Velocity
by bakedvause
Summary: AU in which Piper Chapman, fresh out of college, begins teaching Physics in seventeen year old Alex Vause's high school. Other teachers have let Alex just barely make it through her years there, but Piper isn't one to go down without a fight, no matter how much Alex makes her want to rip her hair out.
1. Chapter 1

**I**

* * *

Senior year was nothing short of a miracle for Alex Vause. She stepped into the doors of the massive building with confident strides, the heels of her black combat boots clunking against the floors. Heads turned at the sound, but wandering gazes were quickly averted when they saw just who had entered the building. Alex was used to this feeling of power that surged up her spine every time that she walked these halls.

Fear.

They hated her.

Not to say that she blamed them particularly. Alex had gotten away with more things at this school than anyone ever had in the academy's entire history. No one quite knew why, not even Alex herself. That didn't stop her from relishing in it. The sea of students parted when she entered, throwing angry and disgusted glares in her direction. They would never act on it. Some days she wished that they did, just to add some excitement to her mornings. Her book bag was slung over one shoulder, completely devoid of anything that one would need for class, and bounced against her back with every step. With a sucker in her mouth and a tiny bag of weed discreetly hidden on her person, she made her way to first period. This was a first, and she hoped that the teacher wouldn't get used to it.

Shoulders brushed against hers as she shouldered through the handful of freshmen, too ignorant to the school to know who she was or why exactly they should never stand in her fucking way. A fifteen year old girl glanced up through long eyelashes with an insult on her lips that died right there as soon as she made eye contact. Most people found it hard to stare these days. Alex's hand twitched on the strap of her book bag and she had to physically stop herself from reaching up and touching the side of her face. She already knew what she would find there. She had that spot memorized through three months of touching it and staring in the mirror. She knew the feeling of that raised and jagged skin better than any other. She still asked whatever higher entity that would listen why she wasn't blind in her left eye.

She still hadn't received an answer.

The freshman girl slowly backed away with an avoidant gaze. So that was Alex Vause.

Alex was tall, abnormally so, with jet black hair that reflected an almost violet glint in the florescent light of the school. Her height had made her a target since she was a child due to her gangly build that lasted until she was sixteen. The past three months had made a large difference. Physically, she was still tall and a bit awkward; however she seemed to fit inside of her skin better than she had last school year. It fit her bones and her muscle in a way that it refused to do before. Most importantly, it fit her mind. She was finally herself and not some stranger that she encountered every time that she passed a reflective surface. Life and death situations do that to a person. You really come face to face with who you are. She didn't bother stopping at her locker, it had been the same one since she had first come to the school, because without any materials there was no point. So she was early to her first class.

Her last class was very much the same.

Blue eyes looked up from her painfully neat desk to rest on her first new student of this class period. This must have been the teacher's first year. Alex had never seen this woman before.

"Good afternoon! Have a seat anywhere you'd like. I'll probably switch them up by the end of the week, anyway." The blonde woman smiled from her office chair and a twinkle in her azure irises.

Alex glared.

The teacher, Ms. Chapman was written on the whiteboard in the curly script of a purple marker, visibly hesitated as she met Alex's eyes.

"You must be Alex Vause." She murmured gently with one understanding nod, a faltering smile, and a heavy swallow.

The younger woman quirked a taunting eyebrow in her teacher's direction. Her teachers never really liked her. Alex could guess it was because she didn't put any effort into their classes and constantly undermined their authority, but she would like to think that they just weren't sure how to deal with her. This was going to be one of those teachers.

"Alright, well it's a pleasure to have you, Alex. I've heard a lot about you." The seated woman attempted to keep the sound of optimism in her voice. True, she had heard very much about Alex, nevertheless the things that she heard were frightening. She had come straight out of college into this job only to overhear gossip in the teacher's lounge a week before school started that a student had gotten into a lethal knife fight on the last day of the previous school year. For any other student, the suspension or even expulsion would have transferred over to the following year, but all of the evidence was compromised and the witnesses silenced. Apparently in a room of ten people, no one saw a thing. It was Alex's word against the other teenager's and the lanky girl sitting in the very back row of her classroom was the only one with an actual injury. They let her go, consequence free.

No one had heard from the other kid.

Alex kept her eyes trained on her teacher with a leveled look. Ms. Chapman was pretty in a movie star kind of way. Her hair was to the middle of her back with gentle waves guiding the tresses down her thin frame. Cerulean eyes were confident, the look of someone who thought she was in control. She would come to her senses eventually; Alex would make sure of that. In their stare down, Alex's gaze never wavering and Ms. Chapman's quickly turning wary, the other students began to file in one by one until every desk was full and Alex was nearly able to blend into a desk in the back of the classroom. That is, if Ms. Chapman were having any of that. With a calculating glint behind her blue eyes she smiled at the entirety of the class and announced right off the bat that she was changing seats. She was met with groans and a few eye-rolls, and why not, right? Most of them were juniors, set to graduate in due time, not children.

She didn't care.

She was not one to give up on her students, so she planned on being the hardest on the one that cared the least for her class. Alex Vause was moved front and center. The pale teenager stood with a hard glare in her emerald eyes as she moved to the front of the classroom. Every single fucking gaze in the entire room was on her as she slid into a desk that was previously occupied by some blond boy who was actually supposed to be in that class. Alex took Physics last year and failed. She was only there to make up her credit, not to get in good with her WASP-y teacher and certainly not to make her job easier by cooperating throughout the year. Ms. Chapman was going to hate her because she didn't try, and Alex Vause could not fathom anyone actually giving a shit.

By the end of class, everyone else was turning in their completed diagnostic tests. Alex's was blank. When she set it down on the desk, eyes anywhere else but on her teacher, Ms. Chapman raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

"Miss Vause." She stated with an edge of irritation in her tone. Alex turned her head to look at this woman that she did not understand in the slightest. Every other teacher she'd had would have shaken their head and let her go. What did Chapman want?

"This paper is blank. You had forty-five minutes to complete this diagnostic, so please explain to me why there isn't even a name on it."

Alex shrugged one shoulder with an unfazed expression. She didn't care, honestly.

"I'd like for you to stay after class. Since apparently this diagnostic was too difficult for you to even put your name on, we're going to go over it together. You don't have anywhere important to be, right?"

Silence.

"I thought as much."

So Alex grudgingly pulled up the chair from her desk, mentally kicking the shit out of herself for not coming up with a lie to get out of this like she had done with countless teachers numerous times. But it was too late, and Ms. Chapman was explaining question number one. Once the raven haired girl got tired of hearing something that she already fully understood she simply rolled her eyes and snatched the sheet from her teacher's long fingers. With a pen, stolen from the kid who sat next to her in that class, she circled in every answer within a five minute period of Ms. Chapman looking at her like she was some type of manner-less five year old.

Alex slid the paper back across the desk to her teacher, much gentler with it than she had been when she snatched it away minutes ago. With a curiously quirked eyebrow, the blonde took the diagnostic test and skimmed over it, already familiar with the answers. A frown made her eyebrows dig downward and a little crease appeared between them on her forehead.

"Alex… If you already knew the answers, why didn't you finish this test in class like everyone else?"

Green eyes rose from where they rested on the yellow pencil holder atop the desk to make eye contact with Ms. Chapman, this unfamiliar woman and teacher. For the first time since she had left her house that morning, she spoke.

"Maybe because I'm not everyone else."

_"You are not everyone else, Alex. I don't care who is wearing what from where. You remember who your fuckin' father is, you hear me? While those little bitches in your grade are going home to father's working their stupid nine to five jobs in boring business suits, yours is touring around the country."_

_It was a conversation that she'd had before, hundreds of times if she had to count._

_It started the same and ended the same each time that it happened. Alex would express how the other girls in her grade bullied her for not having money like they did, call her 'pigsty' and pull her hair at recess. Her mother seemed to be trying to convince herself more than her daughter that the life that they had together, no matter how frugal, was something that others should be envious of. They both knew that her father wasn't anyone to brag about. Alex was ten years old, but she wasn't stupid. Of course she would like to imagine that he would come home one day in a stretch limo and take her and her mother off to live with him in some fancy mansion on an island somewhere, but she knew that he wouldn't._

_He hadn't sent them a dime since she was born and if she had to bet on it, she would put money on him never showing his face again. But her mother had yet to come to that conclusion, so Alex kept her mouth shut and nodded like the good girl that she was, lips pursed and head down. Her day would go as it typically would. Her mother, Diane, would drop her off at home and keep going to work her second job at thefast food place a few blocks away. Alex would sit at home and do her homework with her father's album playing on her walkman and try not to think about how shitty those girls from school made her feel. Her mother would come home again at around eleven at night, maybe catch a quick shower, and change clothes to go work at the Wal-Mart by her old daycare._

_Alex would rummage through the refrigerator for something to eat because her mother would be too pre-occupied to remember to bring her dinner before she left for her third job. Eventually she would find a half-forgotten, but still edible, jar of mayonnaise or some other condiment, and spread it between two slices of bread from the cupboard. She would eat her dinner in her room, alone, and after throwing her crumbs away, she would change into an old t-shirt. After laying out the same clothes that she wore to school that day to wear tomorrow, she would crawl into bed and sleep, but not before praying to a god that she wasn't still sure she believed in for some miracle to happen that would make things better for them._

_Alex Vause knew sorrow._

Ms. Chapman's eyes studied the emerald ones across from her with a look somewhere between pity and confusion. Her shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh as she ran her gaze over the hastily finished, yet completely correct, work sheet in her hands. With an unreadable expression, Alex raised an eyebrow and stood from her chair.

"Can I go now?" She murmured in a voice that suggested that she would truly be anywhere else. Grudgingly, and with a million questions still building on her tongue, Ms. Chapman nodded several times and gingerly placed the sheet on top of all the other stacks of papers.

"Good night, Miss Vause." The blonde woman parted reluctantly.

She did not receive a reply.

Alex walked out of the door with her head held high and confident strides in her step, but Piper Chapman knew that something was off, and there was no way in hell that she was letting her student fall through the cracks.

* * *

The second day of school came around along with an intense feeling of determination coursing through Piper Chapman's veins. She woke up at five in the morning for a quick jog around her neighborhood and returned to her small, one bedroom apartment with a glow to her cheeks and a shine across her forehead. Her skin tight, dri-fit shirt clung to her torso enticingly as sweat dripped from her chin. She had really pushed herself that day. When she ran, all that she was able to think about was how she would get her student to open up so that she could help her do well in the class. The blonde continued to grow frustrated because it wasn't a tutoring issue, Alex clearly knew the material, but it was a motivation issue. She could not make any of her students do anything. If Alex Vause had lost the will to do well in school, then Piper was fucked, and the raven haired teen would fail. There was some sort of disconnect between Alex and school, so Piper made it her goal to figure out just what that cut off was. Due to her frustrations, she had run an extra mile just to get all of the tension out of her muscles. She showered and prepared to go back into work that morning.

When she arrived, the school was just opening. Teachers had to be there even earlier than students and that was still a bit much as far as Ms. Chapman was concerned. She entered the teacher's lounge for a cup of, surprisingly amazing, coffee and sat on one of the several couches scattered about the average sized room.

"How's it going, Chapman?" exclaimed a heavily accented, feminine voice from the doorway. That particular voice was impossible to mistake and Piper felt a grin pull at her lips when she heard it. Her baby blue eyes rose to lock on the gaze of no other than Lorna Morello, Trigonometry teacher, and good friend of hers ever since she arrived at the academy. The bubbly ray of sunshine never failed to brighten her day and after the previous afternoon, Piper could use all of the happiness she could get.

"You look so down. What's the matter?" She questioned after further taking in the blonde teacher's rugged appearance. She wasn't in an obvious funk; Lorna just knew how to read people. It was a gift of hers that had scared girlfriends and boyfriends alike away for years. Piper hesitated briefly, her bottom lip finding its way between her pearly white teeth. After a moment, she locked eyes with Lorna and asked, "Have you had a student by the name of Alex Vause?"

A look of recognition flashed in Lorna's bright eyes and a hesitant laugh left her red lips.

"That one is something else, I'll tell you. Brilliant kid, zero effort." She shook her head and tsked twice.

"It's a shame, really. Her mom's really nice when she comes up to the school. She can't make it often because it says on her record that she's working three jobs, but she's good. Very good woman. What about Alex?" Lorna's cinnamon colored eyes watched Piper in curiosity as she moved further into the teacher's lounge. She dropped her bag down by the couch that Piper occupied and perched on the arm rest in a manner that reminded the blonde heavily of a little bird.

Delicate.

"Oh, nothing. I just have her in my final class period." The blue eyed woman mentioned as she observed the brunette. Ms. Morello's eyes widened briefly before she reigned in her reaction with a nod and a forced smile. Her grin was blinding.

"Really! Well, I'm sure you'll have better luck with that girl than the rest of us have. She's something else, really." Lorna laughed, and Piper caught the feeling that the shorter woman was trying to sugar coat the fuck out of her situation.

"But she's good! She's a good kid. She just needs a steer in the right direction." The brunette declared with a final nod. Just like that she was up from her balanced position on the arm of the couch and making her way toward the coffee machine. The overhead light buzzed gently above them at the same time that the refrigerator kicked in, sending the joint sounds of electrical and machinery throughout the room. Lorna offered no further discussion. Speaking of Alex seemed to have really caught her off guard, and Piper could only wonder just what these teachers were so hesitant about.

Her day dragged along agonizingly slow as she waited for her last period class. She was going to get Alex to participate if it killed her. She watched her students file in one by one during the passing period and her eyes slowly narrowed as she stared at the one desk in the very front of the room where Alex should be. The seat was empty when the bell rang, signaling the start of class. Piper's nostrils flared briefly before she reigned in her temper and began her lesson to all of the students with an actual interest in learning. That class also dragged on, slower than all of the rest because she really just wanted to go home and take a hot shower. She was deflated.

When class was over, she waited until all of her other students had gone to start to pack up her things. She took her time, even though she wanted to sprint home as soon as possible, but she couldn't find the energy, so she ambled about the classroom. Her things were packed and she was finishing up the grading of papers from her first two classes when a gentle, almost timid knock at the door made her gaze shoot up. There stood none other than Alex Vause, eyes unreadable behind her black framed glasses and leather jacket snug around her curvy body. There was no book bag to be seen, no books either. Piper shouldn't have been surprised.

"Miss Vause." She greeted, more in disbelief than in welcome.

Green eyes glided around the room as if memorizing her surroundings before finding their way back to her blonde haired teacher with the pretty smile and fierce passion for her job.

"I missed your class today." She stated obviously, and then wanted to kick herself for sounding so stupid. She didn't know where this deep urge to make a lasting impression on the older woman stemmed from, but it was pissing her off if it happened and making her more upset if she avoided her, so there she was. Piper's dexterous fingers moved smoothly over the stack of papers on her desk as she collected them all together and straightened them out. They tapped against the desk once, twice, and then her gaze was back on her student.

"May I ask where you were?" The blonde inquired as she set the papers neatly in a folder specifically for those class periods and nodded her head toward the seat at the front of the class. Alex stepped forward.

Her black boots from the day before clunked on the linoleum as she slowly sauntered over to her teacher. Dark jeans hugged her endless legs from bottom to top and then her leather jacket topped the outfit off with its tight hold around her torso. Piper forced her eyes anywhere else. Alex pulled the chair from her desk to the front of Piper's and sat in it much how she had yesterday, except this time she turned the chair backwards and sat in it with those sinful legs on either side of the back of the seat.

Her arms rested on the top of Ms. Chapman's desk and one pale hand moved upward to brush a strand of onyx hair behind her ear and push her glasses up off of her nose. The entire display forced Piper to stare. She shouldn't have, of course. It was completely unprofessional, yet there was something so both unbelievably sensual and innocent to the way that Alex's glasses rested on her face. It didn't make sense. Her eyes gravitated toward the scar.

"I was in the Dean's office. We were discussing an incident that happened last school year." She murmured the last part with a boastful quirk of her eyebrow. Piper could infer that she meant the knife fight. The clock on the far wall ticked continuously as blue eyes studied the pale girl's face.

"What happened last school year?" The blonde questioned. She wanted to hear Alex say it herself, or even to see if the tall brunette would lie about the incident, which wasn't likely considering how proud she seemed to be of it.

"The official report said that the fucker slashed me down my face." Alex's tone hardened once she referenced her scar, even though her previous demeanor was almost gloating when Piper had asked her to explain further.

Piper's eyebrows rose in shock at the other girl's tone. The anger in her voice seemed too much for the teenaged body that it resided in. Piper folded her hands atop the desk.

"And the unofficial report?" The blue eyed teacher murmured with the slight furrowing of her eyebrows. A smirk overtook Alex's previously livid expression and she leaned even further onto Piper's desk. Piercing green eyes studied the Physics teacher with a lascivious glint behind their irises and the blonde felt her eyes widen and her next breath get stuck in her throat.

"You know how it goes, Ms. Chapman. Whatever happened in the official report is exactly what occurred. Any other questions usually just get you in trouble." With that, Alex Vause stood from her seat and smoothly slid her chair back to where her desk sat in the very front of the class.

Piper still couldn't articulate a reply. Her gaze remained focused and her eyebrows scrunched, yet she couldn't force a word out of her mouth.

"Good night, Ms. C." Alex's perpetual smirk only got wider as she sauntered toward the classroom door. Piper finally blinked and made an ending eye contact with the raven haired girl as she exited the room. Alex gave her a lascivious wink, and then she was gone. Piper's sun-kissed hand rose to slam on the top of her desk out of frustration with the nerve of this fucking girl, but she stopped herself mid-way and took a deep breath through flared nostrils before she went to gather her things.

She was going home.

There was no way in hell that she would be able to focus in that classroom.


	2. Chapter 2

**II**

* * *

Alex couldn't breathe. Each attempt at raking even an ounce of air into her burning lungs caused an upsetting rattling noise to come from deep within her chest. Sweat dripped from her forehead to the icy concrete floor below her, adding a comforting chill to her sweat shined body.

There was blood on her jacket.

Alex was pretty sure it was hers.

Her clammy fingers reached out blindly for any sort of protection. Curling in this fetal position had only helped her situation so much. Another earth shattering blow landed to her already busted rib cage and she couldn't even find the breath to scream anymore. She chanced a glance upward through damp eyelashes and her eyes were met by none other than her boss, Fahri.

Alex had made a mistake, a huge, massive mistake that cost him around two grand from potential buyers the next city over. She had called herself skimping out on product to save the business some additional money, not enough to be noticeable, but enough that they could keep a few hundred dollars in their pockets for treats. Alex was no stranger to a good time. Except these people were fucking professionals who had been in this game for longer than Alex had been on this earth and fuck she was an idiot for trying to screw them over. Fahri had received orders from the man upstairs, Kubra, to handle their badly informed little sixteen year old. He made sure that he did, with pleasure.

"Is this shit a game to you, Vause?" Fahri grunted as he rolled her onto her back with the tip of his leather boot clad foot. Sweat beaded on his brow as he raked his gaze over the poor imbecile at his feet.

Silence.

"_Fuckin' answer me, you piece of shit_!" Fahri roared from his position above the crumpled body on the ground.

Spittle flew from his mouth.

Alex attempted to force out an answer, anything to make him stop punishing her, but she could barely catch a breath to groan, let alone to answer a question. An alarming wheeze exited her chapped lips as her eyes blearily flitted around the room.

Where the fuck was she?

"God, you're lucky your mother's still around, kid. You'd be a dead son of a bitch." The foreign man ranted mostly to himself as he shuffled in and out of Alex's line of vision. Suddenly an unfamiliar weight was on her stomach that caused her to hiss in agony at the jostling of her rib cage.

"You wanna act like this business is a joke, Vause? I'll give you a permanent reminder of exactly why it isn't fucking funny to fuck around with the product." He growled low and in her face, pressing excruciatingly close to her damaged ribs. He straddled her stomach heavily and the glint of silver had barely registered in her fogged mind until it was too late. A searing pain shot down the left side of her face followed by the unmistakable feel of liquid dripping down that side of her head and soaking her hair as it slid to her scalp from her position on her back.

A strangled scream resonated throughout the entire warehouse that she was held captive in. The tendons in her milky neck stood out and strained as she thrashed on the ground, unable to fully express her agony through the extreme discomfort of her rib cage. The vein in her forehead became prominent at the amount of strain that her body put on locking up and then writhing against the cement floor. Fahri stood from on top of her and paced for a few more moments, muttering words that could have been another language for as much as Alex could even try to understand. She curled up into a fetal position and sobbed, a distinct rattling of her lungs every time she took a breath was the only noise that filled the warehouse for hours into the night.

* * *

Piper Chapman didn't like to ask for much.

Through her mother's appalling obsession over an excessively frivolous lifestyle, Piper had learned early on to be more appreciative of the trivial things.

She liked simplicity.

That, for her, included curling up on the couch with a glass of white wine and a cigarette, even though her landlord preferred that she not smoke in the apartment. She enjoyed smooth jazz on a calm, rainy day and old-school hip-hop when she was feeling particularly creative. She was astoundingly bright, graduating from high school at the tender age of sixteen and going to college that following school year. She attended Stanford University for six years, her goal the entire time there to become a physics teacher, and graduated Summa Cum Laude from the college by the time she was twenty-two.

Piper, even at age twenty-two, was rather uncomplicated.

Being uncomplicated, however, did not mean that she didn't hold a raging temper boiling beneath the surface.

Her mother caused it to brim over more often than not.

"Piper, I'm so glad you're available. I talked to this very nice man at the coffee shop this morning and I think you would like him. I set up a date for you two this Saturday-"

"_What_? Why would you think that I need help finding a guy? Who said that I even want to date right now?" The pounding on the right side of Piper's temple that often arrived whenever she spoke to her mother was very much alive right then. For fuck's sake, she was an adult. She did not need her mother setting her up with guys like they were going on a fucking play date.

"Don't be ridiculous. He's a lovely man. I have to go now; your father needs help in the kitchen. He tried to make his own dinner tonight-"

"Mom-!"

"Good night, dear!"

With that, the line was dead and Piper was ready to explode. What made her even angrier was that this wasn't the first time that her mother had done such a thing. Piper made it a point to explain to her that the efforts were not appreciated and it would be best for everyone if she stopped trying to find her a future husband, but apparently that was too complex of a direction to follow. With every muscle in her tensed body, she refrained from hurling the device clutched in her right hand against the brick wall ahead of her.

Piper's apartment was earthy, with brick walls, and a floor and ceiling made of wooden planks. Several potted plants hung artistically from the ceiling, suspended by thin, clear wires. Candles adorned several flat surfaces of the open living room and brilliant photography that she had captured herself hung in frames, separated perfectly by two inches of space between each. She could see none of that now through the haze of red clouding her vision.

Her phone burned hot in her palm, and with a steadying breath, Piper set the mobile device down onto the white-wood coffee table in the center of the living area, right beside the lilac candle that she had made herself over the summer. Azure eyes scanned the room absently as she brought two hands up to rest on top of her head, fingers interlocked where they met in the center. It did not take mach to set her off, and she had been doing better since taking yoga classes over the summer. She needed to find her peace of mind, or her happy place as her doctor had called it, and count to ten.

_One_.

So of course her mind immediately went to the real fucking piece of work that was Alex Vause, with her permanent smirk on her full lips and a swagger like she was too good for the world. That girl's husky voice that could hold the world together with the way it dripped from her tongue like honey.

_Two_.

A girl's obsession with leather had never been more distracting in Piper's entire god-damn life. A skin tight, black leather jacket that seemed nearly painted on the skin beneath should be illegal. Piper couldn't fathom how she was supposed to focus on teaching the class, let alone how the other students were supposed to pay attention to her lesson with five-foot-ten of sex appeal sitting right in the front of the classroom. That girl's eyes, fucking hell, that girl's eyes were hypnotic. Piercing, emerald green irises that looked Piper right in the eyes when they talked and stared directly into her soul without asking for permission shouldn't have been able to stop her mid-sentence during her lesson on the first day because she couldn't remember where her thought was going.

_Three_.

Alex and her fucking glasses.

Most of the time the black-framed spectacles sat perched on the fair-skinned girl's nose, but it was the manner in which Alex shifted those glasses throughout the class period on the first day that had almost ruined Piper. It had to be sinful, the way that Alex would pinch one side of her glasses at her temple and raise them up on top of her head while staring directly at her with that knowing glint in her emerald gaze and a gentle raise of a perfectly arched eyebrow. The gesture was already frustrating enough when trying to focus and teach a class, but it only infuriated Piper more when she realized that the girl in the very front of the classroom wasn't even paying attention because she couldn't fucking see the equation for finding velocity that was penned with Piper's neat and elegant penmanship on the board. It was obvious how bad Alex's vision was with the way that she would squint at the clock every fifteen minutes or so because she had picked up on the very first day how much it aggravated the blonde to see her students so eager to leave ahead of the bell. It was the final period, granted, but their lessons were no less important.

_Four_.

Piper's thoughts skidded to a screeching halt when her mind went to Alex's long, dexterous fingers.

She was so fucked.

She couldn't think of a student this way.

It was immoral and wrong.

Piper's mind immediately argued back that she wasn't planning to pursue Alex and that everything was manageable as long as her thoughts were never put into action.

Wrong, so wrong.

Alex was five years younger than her, a noticeable age gap but not extreme at all.

Piper knew that she had to stop making excuses that made her thoughts seem validated, she really did.

Alex was seventeen, and Piper needed a drink.

She had four.

* * *

When Alex got home, she didn't bother with dinner. Not that she couldn't have picked some up on her way home, but she was so used to foregoing the meal by this point that she wouldn't even be able to stomach it at this age. That was fine. She worked better on an empty stomach anyway. Alex and her mother's apartment was painfully small now that she was older, and as a result, bigger. There were still boxes piled in corners from places they had stayed before and ever since they moved there when Alex was six, they still did not have a single place to put any of those items. She wanted to ask why they never just threw them away, but by the time she saw her mom for a brief ten minutes twice throughout the day, the thought would have slipped her mind.

Her sturdy combat boots carried her the very short distance to her bedroom from the front door with light thunks on the floorboards. The entrance to her room was white with several markings and stickers pasted on from her childhood. She probably shouldn't have, considering that they had rented this apartment and the stickers would be a pain in the ass to scrape off should they ever have to move. The floor was wooden and creaky, littered with discarded clothes and CD cases. Her window sill was overrun by candles, which was fine because she didn't have blinds or curtains to possibly catch fire. They lived on the fifth floor. If anyone put that much effort into climbing up to look into her window, they deserved whatever they saw.

As a result of her small candle collection, her room always smelled like a mix between the ocean, cucumber mint, and a bakery. She had nothing on her person carried in from school aside from a small list of school supplies that she would very likely never purchase. All Alex had was a book bag, the same book bag that she had carried since she was in middle school. Thinking about school brought her thoughts right back around to her last period teacher.

Ms. Chapman was supposed to be simple.

She was supposed to hate her job, much like every other teacher at the school, and only feign enough interest in her student's lives to not seem like an uncaring asshole. Alex tried extremely hard to make it seem like she wasn't absolutely baffled by the amount of attention Ms. Chapman had given her specifically, but she was very much confused. No other teacher had given her the time of day as soon as they noticed her not trying in their class. It only made her dislike the work more, and that resulted in her never turning it in.

She did the work, of course.

That was simple.

She felt that education was important, especially since she wanted to do great things in her life no matter her current financial situation. What Alex didn't play into were the school system's games. She had found countless faults in the education system and ever since then, her hatred for it had festered beneath the surface to the point where she stopped bothering with school altogether. Her mother would never understand that, so she simply let her believe that she wasn't smart enough to do any better than her grades had suggested. It was only stupid for the ones who wanted to go to college and get conventional nine to five jobs. Alex had grand plans. She was going where no one else would because she wanted greater.

Alex Vause was the exception.

She had such a fierce belief in herself and in her future that Ms. Chapman coming in and actually making her feel remorse for not participating in her class and undermining her higher authority spun everything in a confusing fog around her mind.

Alex was haunted by concerned cerulean eyes all night.

Even while she studied her texts and took notes within the margins of her notebook while she answered problems and asked herself questions of her own about the subject matter, she thought about Ms. Chapman. She thought about those soft eyes that had looked upon her with pity when Alex hadn't finished her diagnostic and flippantly answered to why she hadn't completed the task. Alex thought about the crinkles in the corner of those azure eyes when the blonde laughed or smiled at something amusing that a student or another teacher would do in class. Alex wanted to be the one to make her laugh. She wanted to completely grasp the feeling that came with causing that heart-stopping mega-watt grin to spread across her pink lips, flashing perfectly straight teeth in the light. Alex wanted nothing more than to know Ms. Chapman outside of the classroom walls.

So when she finished her homework, she plotted.

Tomorrow, she would play upon Ms. Chapman's concern for her future grades in the class by asking if she could stay behind for tutoring. The blonde beauty would of course say yes, because she would do anything for her students, and then she and Alex could be alone once more.

They would focus on the work, but Alex would charm her if it was the last thing that she did. She needed to do something to get a foothold in the older woman's life, of that, she was absolute.

* * *

The final class period that Alex had been anticipating for the entire morning had arrived with the sound of the releasing bell of seventh period. Never had she so quickly gathered her things and walked to her concluding class with such determination. A light in her emerald eyes and an extra purpose to her step caused onlookers to spectate with confusion in their gazes. Alex Vause never grinned. Then again, anyone with an intense confidence in their ability to get Piper Chapman would be on cloud nine. Her foot falls were silent against the loud chatter that came with hundreds of students conversing in the halls. A shoulder bumped into hers and she glanced upward with a sneer of utter disgust on her lips that fell as soon as she made eye contact with the man that her boss answered to.

"Kubra." She swallowed heavily and took a step back, nearly knocking into a lowerclassman with her inherent fear of the heavily-muscled, olive toned man. Her hand flew up to push her glasses down onto her face so that she would be at no visual disadvantage should anything happen, no matter how outrageous the thought was that he would try to harm her in the middle of a crowded hallway.

The foreign man grinned charmingly and placed a meaty hand on her shoulder with all of the affection of a man to his little boy.

She wasn't his fucking son.

"Vause, just the girl I was searching for." He smirked and looked down on her with a knowing glint behind his dark irises. The pale girl took a step to the side in an attempt to go around him.

"I have to get to class." She muttered and was stopped mid-step by him getting directly in front of her, a deep chuckle rumbling from his wide chest.

"Since when do you care about class?" He cooed with his heavy Cuban accent that made her cringe and get goosebumps whenever it slid against her eardrums the way that it did. Without looking the man in the eye, she tried once more to get around him.

No one even looked in their direction.

"Don't you have a job to do? You know, as Dean of the school?" She growled and finally eyed him with a malevolent glint in her piercing green eyes. He pulled his hand away from her shoulder and held both of them up, palms facing outward in surrender. A smirk still played on his full lips as he stepped around Alex and walked backward while keeping eye contact with her.

"You're correct, Vause. I'll see you in detention." It was as if he had sucked the malicious look from Alex's eyes into the smirk that worked his lips as he sauntered away and around the corner of the hall.

The lanky teen marched into her class with a raging pounding hammering away at her temples and a lack of her Physics book because Kubra had distracted her from going to her locker. She slid down into the seat with a strong sense of deflation that didn't even leave once the bell rang and Ms. Chapman began her lesson. She was the first person that the blonde called on to answer a question that Alex hadn't even been listening to.

"Alex?" Piper questioned once more with a curious raise of her eyebrow as she shifted her weight slightly to sit perched on the edge of her desk with those delightfully toned legs crossed at the knee and her arms placed on either side of her body, gripping the desk's edge loosely.

Emerald eyes blinked twice.

"Excuse me?" Alex questioned with the feeling of warmth burning the tips of her ears, which were thankfully covered by her thick, onyx tresses.

"If a car were to move sixty kilometers, what would be its displacement?" Ms. Chapman repeated the question while staring directly into her eyes, something that Alex was so unaccustomed to people other than Fahri and Kubra doing since the incident that it completely threw her off balance and she answered the simple question with another one.

"What's the object's direction?"

With a grin playing on her pink lips and longer eye contact than was actually necessary, Piper focused completely on her most intriguing student as she considered the question for a brief second.

"South."

The ball was in Alex's court. It may not have seemed as significant to Piper considering that the woman had only had Alex in her class a grand total of two times in the three days of the school year, yet to any other teacher this behavior would have been astounding. Alex never answered questions with anything other than a shrug or an 'I don't know', and she sure as hell never asked for further detail of a question so that she could answer it more extensively. Alex decided that she wanted that smile.

"The displacement of the car would be sixty kilometers south." It was a simple question with an obvious answer if one knew the physics definition of 'displacement' to begin with, but her answer was significant in that a milestone was reached without either of them failing to acknowledge it.

"Can you explain why?" Piper's azure eyes studied the other girl, that smile beginning to tug at the corners of her slightly thin lips as she waited for an answer.

"Because the displacement is how far out of place the car is from where it's starting point was. If the car only went sixty kilometers and then stopped, then the displacement is sixty kilometers." Alex's voice was confident and rang with sureness throughout the classroom, an experience that Piper Chapman was the only one in the building to have witnessed in an extremely long time.

"So what would the displacement be if the car traveled sixty kilometers and then traveled back another sixty kilometers to exactly where it began?" Piper pushed further with an expectant and prideful glint in her baby blue eyes as she watched Alex sit up tall at her desk, a posture that hadn't been embodied by the tall girl until now.

"Zero. If the car returns to its exact initial position, then there is zero displacement from its starting point."

The blinding grin that Alex had been hoping for spread across Ms. Chapman's face and caused those sinful cheekbones to stand out as well as those adorable dimples on either side of the woman's face. The woman was practically spilling over with pride, even though she had to tone down her excitement for the other students' benefits.

"Perfect. So, as Miss Vause demonstrated for us, displacement is very simple to find…"

And on Ms. Chapman went, teaching her lesson.

The only thing Alex could think of was Piper.

And the only thing Piper could think of was Alex.

* * *

It was only seven in the evening, the night sky shrouded in darkness and the stars rendered useless to the eye by the city lights. Kubra sat in his arm chair with a thick cigar between his full lips. A fire crackled in front of him and Fahri stood behind the chair with a bead of sweat budding on his brow and a tense set to his defined jaw.

"Alex seemed a bit vivacious in the hallway when I ran into her today." The Cuban man murmured collectedly. Fahri could see his arm peek out from the side of the chair to flick the ashes in the tray on the end table.

With a deep breath, Fahri took a step forward.

The floor creaked.

"Did she?"

Kubra brought the cigar back to his mouth and took a drag of it. Smoke billowed from his mouth as he blew it outward with a lazy ease. All Fahri could see of it was the amount that rose above the chair.

"Disgustingly so. Until she saw me." The thick accent filled the room even through its leveled tone.

Fahri waited to speak.

"I don't know what's preoccupying her, but I want it eliminated. We can't afford to have one of our most valuable sellers suddenly gaining an ethical code." Kubra's voice was hard and definite. Fahri knew that if he didn't carry out this order, his life was at risk. His boss did not hold value in a human life. He could be gone within the hour if Kubra wished it, completely erased off of the earth.

Alex's distraction disappeared, or he did.

There was no other option.


	3. Chapter 3

**III**

* * *

"Miss Vause, after today, I don't think you need tutoring." Piper's laugh was indescribably beautiful to Alex's currently red tinged ears. Everyone else had long left the classroom to socialize throughout the hallway, gather their things, and leave the building. Every other student had left aside from Alex, who sat backwards on her chair in front of Ms. Chapman's desk the same way that she had yesterday.

They were becoming routine.

Emerald eyes studied the sun-kissed face in front of her, traced the outline of Piper's delicately defined jawbone and the beautifully gentle protrusion of her cheekbones. Finally, her gaze stopped on her teacher's lips for a second too long and Piper's tongue darted out to wet them as Alex stared.

Her gaze shot back up.

"So what if I understand displacement? I'm having trouble with finding velocity." There was slight hesitation in Alex's voice as she attempted to come up with a reason for needing help in class.

Piper wasn't daft.

She knew that Alex could find any velocity in her sleep if her diagnostic was anything to go by, and all without a calculator. The girl's mind worked in a way unfathomable to Ms. Chapman, but she was interested to see how much her student would dumb herself down to spend extra time in her presence. She still could not grasp how a genius like Alex Vause managed to fail nearly every class, yet still earn a composite score of 36 on her ACT the year prior. Piper had taken the initiative to look through the girl's records on her lunch break, just to find out more about her.

She had been curious.

So, among the impossible amount of violations of the code of conduct, Alex Vause also had the highest test scores in the entire school. Upon further research that only involved a few quick searches on Google, Alex also held the highest test scores in the state. The only things dragging her down were her constant run-ins with trouble and her appallingly low GPA.

Piper digressed.

After the moment's consideration, Piper bit her lip out of habit and nodded twice before pulling out a practice work sheet that she'd had on hand just in case a student came for extra help. When she glanced back up, Alex's emerald eyes were darting away from her lips once more.

Piper tried not to smile.

The blonde placed the sheet of paper on her desk and turned it around so that it was no longer upside down to Alex. Piper picked up a pen from the cup holder on the side of her desk and placed it atop the paper, all while glancing at Alex with an expectant look in her eye.

The raven haired girl picked up the pen gingerly and slowly scrawled her name across the top of the sheet. After a few moments of Alex mentally reminding herself that she shouldn't start the sheet if she wanted to really sell the idea that she didn't understand the subject, Piper still merely watched with an eyebrow quirked and a smirk tugging at her pink lips.

"Ms. Chapman?" Alex murmured as her gaze flicked all over Piper's amused face. The blonde nearly wanted to call Alex out on her bluff of not understanding velocity, but she held on. Leaning forward onto the desk so that she could further see the paper without having to take it from Alex and turn it back around, she read over the first problem upside down. Emerald eyes were fixated on the tiny amount of cleavage that pushed together when Piper leaned forward. With a jolt, Alex yanked her gaze away and tried her best to focus on the work. When the blonde began to explain the formula to find velocity, Alex's eyes were trained on the woman's soft-looking lips.

"…once you plug in the distance over the time, you punch that into your calculator and show your work on the sheet. You will always have to show your work, I don't care how minimal it is." When Piper looked back up from the half-completed worksheet, she was met with Alex's piercing jade eyes. They didn't avert themselves like the previous times. Their gazes dragged and crashed together like semi-trucks.

Perhaps Alex could have found the velocity of their heart beats toward each other had they not been restricted by their rib cages.

There was some sort of unseen force between them that charged the air with a palpable current. Neither of them understood it; hell, they hardly knew each other, but that didn't prevent them from fixating onto each other's eyes like they had found the answer to life within their irises. Piper's breath caught in her chest, sitting stagnant in her lungs until her body could remember how to push it from her nose. Cerulean melted into fierce emerald, the ocean and the forest melding together to create their own little island right before their eyes. They might as well have been on one, considering how oblivious they both became when lost in each others' gaze. The fire alarm could have gone off right then and they wouldn't have even blinked. To anyone watching, the sight would have been rather odd. No one just _stared_ at each other like these two did. What no one would have been able to grasp was that they held an entire conversation through their gazes, these two pairs of eyes that spoke volumes to their owners.

Piper grew tired of fighting against the current.

After their long moment of silence, Piper finally asked, "How did you really get your scar?"

Her voice was smooth and soft in the silence of the room, save for the clock on the far wall, which was gradually ticking away her will to stay emotionally detached from her student.

With an almost guilty half smile tugging at the right corner of her mouth, the pen hanging precariously from Alex's fingers softly clattered to the desk and she brought her fingers up to gently brush across the scar completely out of habit. The pale girl gained a far-away look in her eye as she stared past Piper's head and remembered the ending of her last school year and the weeks that she had spent out of school because she was too ashamed, or perhaps afraid, for anyone to see her.

The control that Kubra and Fahri had over her was vexing to say the least.

Alex worked her jaw from side to side as she reigned in her temper as well as the alarmingly overwhelming urge to cry. She wasn't one to shed tears over even the most horrible things, she had been through enough to have a high tolerance for sorrow, but Alex was startled to find that Piper's presence made the feeling of helplessness abate and the tears that she felt pricking at her eyes were from the relief of being thrown a potential life line.

Alex blinked them away.

Not in front of Ms. Chapman.

She removed her fingers from her face and allowed her hand to rest back on the desk as she returned her gaze to Piper's searching azure eyes.

"There is a man that I work for…" Alex trailed off with a sigh as she considered how she would word what she would say next without revealing to her Physics teacher exactly who had been the cause of her agony.

"And let's just say that I made a mistake that cost him a lot of money and he was pretty pissed off…" Forest green eyes returned to cerulean ones to gauge the blonde woman's reaction. The look on her eyes would have been best described as alarmed.

Alex continued.

"So this is my little reminder that I shouldn't make mistakes. There's no room for error here." The final part was said almost as an after thought, Alex's eyebrows furrowed slightly as she considered the words, and then she realized why it had caught her own attention.

"Here?" Piper inquired.

Alex swallowed.

_Lie, lie, lie._

"Alex?" The blonde asked once more after several beats of silence.

_**Lie, lie, lie**_.

She could grab hold of her life line right there or she could continue to drown.

Alex hated water.

"Yes."

A spark of something unfamiliar to Alex sparked in Piper's azure irises.

"An adult man, here?" The blonde clarified, to which Alex nodded faintly.

She would fucking kill him.

The sun-kissed woman's temper flared dangerously and boiled right beneath the surface, ready to erupt as soon as she found whoever had done that to Alex.

Beautiful, intricate, troubled Alex.

_Her_ Alex.

Possessive.

Her voice was calm.

"Can you tell me who?" Her lips were pursed, and her nostrils flared slightly. Piper's hands clasped together atop her desk to prevent them from shaking in rage, worksheet forgotten and pen abandoned. Emerald eyes darted down and noted the tense set of the blonde's hands and the way that the muscles flexed in her arms, visible due to her blazer hanging off the back of her chair and the white, sleeveless dress shirt that the shorter woman had worn to work that day. The raven haired girl hesitantly reached out and placed her pale hand over Ms. Chapman's.

Azure eyes noted the gesture and visibly deflated, her shoulders losing their tension and her arms, as well as hands, no longer held muscles or tendons coiled tight beneath the skin. Piper blinked away the last of the furious haze that had clouded her vision before and looked back up into the younger girl's eyes. Alex's scar started right below her left eyebrow and ended on the left side of her chin, barely grazing the corner of her mouth. The flesh wasn't as jagged as it could have been, considering that she'd had to stitch it up herself after Fahri, fuck him, drove her home after slashing her fucking face open.

"_It was nothing personal, just business."_

Alex hated him.

Piper's eyes traveled over the injury once again and kept one hand beneath Alex's as she reached up and faltered, the tips of her fingers a breath away from the scar as she searched the raven haired girl's eyes for permission. Alex didn't give a verbal answer, but merely leaned forward into Piper's touch. The blonde's feather light brushes over the raised skin caused Alex to close her eyes against that alien prick of tears once again.

It was time for Alex to admit to herself that she couldn't do this alone.

"Fahri did this."

Piper's hand stilled against the taller girl's face and her teeth clicked shut violently.

"Mr. Ayvaz?" The blonde hissed.

The fucking_ chemistry _teacher?

_Count to ten, count to ten…_ Piper reminded herself mentally as she closed her eyes briefly against the wave of fury that lapped at her skin like a familiar embrace.

She pushed out her next question through clenched teeth.

"Do your parents know?"

Alex shook her head.

Jade irises landed anywhere but on the older woman in front of her, and instead found themselves fixated on the subtle contrast between her pale skin and Piper's sun-tanned glow. She turned Ms. Chapman's hand over in her fingers and used the tip of her thumb to gently trace the lines and crevices that made up her palm. After a moment's consideration, Alex glanced back up, and liquid emerald locked right back into place with searching azure.

"My mom believes the knife fight story." The raven haired girl never shifted her gaze, even after Piper asked, "What about your dad?"

With a wry grin pulling at the corner of Alex's mouth, her scar curving along with the shift of her lips, the raven haired girl barked out a sardonic laugh.

"_What about_ my dad?" She chuckled humorlessly.

Piper raised a dark eyebrow at the younger girl's reaction. Never having unbearable situations in which her parents split up or anything, aside from her parents' tumultuous cycle of infidelity and returning back to each other in the end, Piper could not fathom why asking about her father was such a touchy subject.

"What does he think of what happened to you?" The blonde reiterated with genuine curiosity.

Alex smirked.

"That's if he thought of me at all. Too bad he doesn't know I exist. Maybe then he could do what actual fathers are supposed to and protect me." The younger girl's tone was laced with bitterness that was alarming for Piper to hear.

Someone so young shouldn't be so angry.

Five years prior, when Piper was seventeen, the blonde had accumulated many a reason to be as irate with her family situation as Alex was. Piper just had a talent for pushing everything down until it all exploded in her face.

Alex didn't wait.

The blonde had not a doubt in her mind that if most people crossed Alex, then they would be quickly, and painfully, reminded of exactly why she wasn't one to fuck with. Piper noted the temper boiling beneath the surface due to her familiarity with the sight. She saw it every time she looked into a mirror.

She and Alex weren't very different in that respect.

Instead of offering a measly apology that she herself wouldn't have even wanted to hear from someone that she had just revealed a painful, personal secret to, Piper interlocked her fingers with Alex's and gazed deeply into those effervescent forest green eyes. The clock continued to tick on the far side of the room, right above the door, and before the blonde could speak, the sound was disrupted by the click of her classroom door opening. Thankfully, Alex's body had shielded the position of their hands from view of none other than the Dean, Kubra. Their touch was broken like the snap of a tightly coiled wire and their gazes shielded once more, all of the openness from before was hastily checked and reined in to either avoid suspicion or as a result of the reminder of their very _platonic_ positions in each other's lives.

Neither wanted to admit which one it was.

The Turkish man sauntered into the room with slow, calculated strides. His steps seared into the linoleum as if branding his name in every inch of the floor space.

This was _his_ domain.

A crooked smirk tugged at his lips as he surveyed the classroom, checking for litter beneath the desks or anything else out of place within the area.

He found nothing.

His silky, black hair was slicked back and oily with gel and his suit fit his muscled frame crisply. With an arrogant adjustment of his tie and his smirk growing impossibly wider, his eyes landed on his favorite student as well as her favorite teacher.

He wasn't aware of the latter quite yet.

"Miss Vause. Interesting running into you here, seeing as how you've never even stayed in school for all eight periods last year. Yet, here you are after class. What is this, a tutoring session?" The imposing man let out a bellowing laugh at the notion.

He thought he was making a joke.

The silence and double glares he received quickly made an impression.

"Oh, my. Well, isn't this something? The one teacher in the building who can actually get _Alex Vause_ to do well in a class is the one teacher that I've come to see about her class' grades." Kubra continued with a deprecating look at Alex while referencing Ms. Chapman sitting directly across from her.

"What's the matter with my class' grades?" The blonde questioned with an incremental tightening of her jaw and pursed lips. Piper Chapman took pride in how she worked her class and coaxed her students' abilities out of them so early in the year. The lowest average out of all one-hundred-and-sixty of her students was an eighty-eight percent. That was nothing to be reprimanded for in her eyes.

"They aren't low enough, Ms. Chapman." Kubra explained as if the answer were painfully obvious. With a disbelieving arch of her dark eyebrows, Piper leaned forward slightly in her desk chair and placed her elbows on the table, hands joined together at her finger tips in a show of authority.

Kubra continued.

"Are you just not grading hard enough, or is your class simply too easy? Your lowest student's grade average is an eighty-eight point three. This is a joke, right?" The man berated Piper before Alex's eyes and it took every fiber of her being not to stand up and punch Kubra in the neck for speaking to Ms. Chapman that way. More than that, Alex was physically unable to go against Kubra for a genuine fear of her life and safety.

She kept her eyes downcast.

Piper didn't need help.

"You can ask any of my students, or look over my lesson plans and work for yourself, but realistically, I teach the most difficult class in this school. I am not lenient with these students and I certainly do not tolerate, excuse my language, half-assed work. I give these students precisely the amount of work that will keep them busy throughout the entire class period, up until the bell rings. If you have a problem with how I teach, especially when it is bringing out nothing but the best in your students as well as bringing up this school's test scores, then I suggest you come teach Physics yourself and see how well you fare." An icy stare frosted over Ms. Chapman's eyes as she spoke eloquently and authoritively to the man who had caused Alex nothing but distress and turmoil since she was a freshman. Her voice was sharp and lashing, actually causing silence to fall over Kubra like a two ton weight.

The man regained his composure with that everlasting smirk and adjusted his tie once more as he slowly backed toward the door, not overlooking the fact that Alex hadn't said a word in his defense. With a curt nod and one hand on the door handle, he couldn't help but to release a final jab.

"Just make sure that they're working for their grades. I better not see _that_ one failing. We all know what a difficult task that is, for the teacher _and_ the student." He said with a blatant dig at Alex, whose eyes narrowed slightly even though her gaze never moved up from its fixed spot on the desk.

She only glanced upward when the door shut with rebeverating finality throughout the classroom.

She flinched at the sound.

The two sat in silence for a moment until Alex's trembling sigh rattled through her chest, and Piper glanced from where her gaze had lingered at the doorway to her student in fright.

"Are you alright?"

Emerald eyes flashed upward and she nodded quickly with a deep breath and another alarming rattling noise emitting from the girl's chest when she inhaled deeply. The concerned eyes of Ms. Chapman raked all over the girl in front of her as she struggled to figure out why her chest was making that noise. Alex had been used to it by that point, so it took a moment for her to register and understand the frightened look on the blonde's face.

"Oh, that's from a broken rib earlier this year. I… I never went to the doctor for it." Alex admitted sheepishly as her teacher pinched the bridge of her nose in exasperation.

"You never went to the doctor for a _broken rib_?" Piper restated in disbelief.

Alex was going to make her hair turn prematurely gray; she could already see it happening.

"They would ask questions, and then there would be paper work, and my mom can't afford hospital bills-"

Piper cut her off with the raise of her hand and the slight shaking of her head.

"Fahri?"

Alex nodded.

Piper had never wanted to murder another human being so badly in her entire life.

_Calm down_.

"Can I come for tutoring tomorrow?" Alex asked, fully aware of the half-completed sheet of paper that still sat discarded on the desk as well as the lonely pen that had rolled to the edge at some point in between her dropping it to the flat surface and the current moment. A smile tugged at Piper's lips despite her previous fury toward the man who had abused her student.

Alex's vibrant eyes drew downward to trace the older woman's lips for the hundredth time that day.

"I actually can't stay after school tomorrow. I have tests to grade."

The raven haired girl frowned slightly as she considered exactly what tests her teacher would be grading. She could have taken the answer as it was and left it alone, but it was hard to leave anything alone when it came to Ms. Chapman.

"But we didn't take a test." Alex pointed out while bringing her gaze back up to mesh perfectly with ocean blue irises. Piper's smile grew even larger as she let out her ringing laugh throughout the otherwise empty classroom. Her azure gaze flickered between Alex's eyes as she raised an eyebrow at her student.

"Well, you will tomorrow."

The pale girl in front of her parted her lips in surprise and she narrowed her eyes playfully at the blonde who had occupied her every thought for the past three days.

"And here's me, with only one day of tutoring under my belt." The emerald eyed girl shook her head in mock self-pity before allowing her face to break into a grin. Piper chuckled and picked up the abandoned pen from the edge of the table before turning it around in her hands several times while she seemed to be contemplating something. After a while, she seemed to come to a decision that would be in Alex's favor if the way that she looked back up at the younger girl with a roguish glint in her gaze was any indication.

"If you don't mind waking up earlier, we can meet up at that little coffee shop around the corner before school. I would hate for you to do a poor job on the test." Ms. Chapman tacked on the last part as a rather useless reminder that their meeting was purely for school work and nothing else.

They both knew that was a lie.

Alex nodded while attempting to curb her enthusiasm just a bit. The feeling was nearly dampened when the blonde continued.

"Speaking of coffee shops, my mother actually set me up on a date with some guy that she met to try and get him and me to date." The older woman laughed outright at the absurdity of the notion. She wasn't sure why she was telling Alex that information, though maybe subconsciously she wanted to see what the younger girl's reaction would be to someone else trying to enter her life romantically.

Alex didn't take it lying down.

With a faint sneer tugging at her lips, the raven haired girl seemed to suck up all of the confidence in the room and exude the behavior proudly.

That wicked smirk of hers curled her bare lips upward.

She leaned forward, legs still on either side of the back rest of the chair, and placed her forearms on the table as she gazed deep into cerulean eyes across from her. Piper's breath hitched in her throat at the sudden intensity of the girl in front of her.

"If it were me, we wouldn't go to some café for our first date. I'd take you to this hill by my house that overlooks this beautiful pond and has a great view of the sunset. First dates should mean something. But, then again, it's not me. He's a lucky man." Alex nearly whispered the last part of her response, causing Piper to stare at this girl in wonder and awe as she often had to restrain herself from doing in her presence. The blonde reached forward and took Alex's hand in her own once more.

"If I had to choose, I think it's obvious who I would pick." Piper winked and stood from her desk chair smoothly, releasing Alex's hand and gathering her things, as well as her blazer on the back of her chair, to go home.

"Great job in tutoring today, Miss Vause. I'll see you tomorrow morning."

Alex grabbed her backpack as well and stood from her seat, swinging her sinfully long leg over the front of the chair in order to stand up from sitting on it backwards. Alex grabbed the work sheet from the desk and folded it in her hands before slipping it into her leather jacket's side pocket. Piper gestured for the younger girl to exit the classroom, ready to follow out behind her as they both walked toward the door. Alex made it to the middle of the doorway before turning on her heel and nearly causing Ms. Chapman to run into her front. The blonde steadied herself and looked up into emerald eyes with a quirked eyebrow. Alex ran her gaze all over the shorter woman's face, lingering on her lips and eyes for a few seconds longer than necessary.

"Tell him that if he hurts you, I'll kill him. That's a promise."

Before Piper could respond, Alex and her long strides were already gaining distance down the hallway and toward the exit. The cerulean eyed woman took a moment to compose her already thundering heart, and when she finally locked the classroom door behind her and began to walk toward the exit to the teacher's parking lot, she tried her best not to think about how wrong they were, yet how right everything felt.

* * *

**A/N: **Thank you all so much for the support with this fic. Your reviews honestly mean the world to me; I can't express that enough. This was supposed to have two scenes, except this one sort of ran away from what I planned and wrote itself. This chapter only took place in the classroom, but the next should involve more variation in location. Don't forget to leave a review! Reactions, suggestions, comments, questions, anything. Love you all.


	4. Chapter 4

**IV**

* * *

Footfalls pounded against the concrete with sure, quick strides. The wind whipped through Piper's blonde tresses furiously and her skin shined with a thin sheen of sweat as she pushed herself harder than she ever had before. Her mind had been driving a hundred miles per minute since she had gotten home the night before.

And the driver had been Alex.

Hard as she might try, it was impossible for her to get the thought of her alluring, raven haired student out of her mind. With labored breathing, she cut around the corner of the block and dove into an all out sprint as she dodged the few straggling pedestrians who were roaming around outside at five in the morning for unknown reasons that had nothing to do with her. Her heart slammed against her rib cage with the exertion of pushing herself as if running could drive out thoughts of her student out of her mind.

In fact, the opposite happened.

Piper began to fully grasp the gravity of what exactly she was doing. Alex was her student, her under aged student. From the glance at the girl's records the day prior, Alex wouldn't turn eighteen until she graduated, which would be during the summer. Hypothetically, if she were to pursue Alex, they could not be together until the other girl was of age and out of the school.

She couldn't.

God, what was wrong with her? Apparently, lost in sultry, emerald eyes, Piper lost all sense of rationality and ability to decipher what was good judgment and what wasn't. She could lose her job and all credibility in the educational system. She had dedicated her life to get where she was, but was it worth throwing it all away for a girl five years younger than she whom made her weak in the knees and her body grow warm with a mere glance?

It was terrifying that she didn't know the answer.

Her music blasted through her ear buds, driving her to push even harder, and her feet ached with their constant beat against the pavement. When she had fully circled back around two neighborhoods to her own block, she slowed until she was shuffling up to her front door. She rested her forearm against it and leaned her forehead on her arm with a heavy sigh. The further thought of that fucking man that had scarred her Alex made her blood boil and simmer in a way that had nothing to do with the rushing of her heart from fatigue. How could she detach herself from someone who had embedded themselves so deeply into her heart that she couldn't fathom closing them out? She felt so protective over Alex that, mentally, she referred to Alex as hers.

Possessive.

She wanted Alex to be hers.

Absently, the thought of homecoming came to mind. Not that she saw Alex as the type of girl to take homecoming seriously or even waste her precious time attending, but the thought of her going with someone else and dancing chest to chest with anyone other than her made her temper flare also. With a pounding headache and purposeful fingers, she unlocked her front door and slammed it behind her. The wire strung potted plants swung from their positions hanging from the ceiling with the force that had shaken the walls. Her footsteps fell in gentle contrast to the force in which she closed the door and she stripped her sweaty running clothes from her body, leaving them in a trail to the bathroom.

She had to stay away from Alex after this day.

It was for the best.

* * *

Waking up early had been interesting, considering her extreme hatred for mornings, but the thought of seeing Ms. Chapman had been enough of an energy boost to get her out of bed and into the shower. Alex stood in front of her bathroom mirror, makeup applied and outfit slightly better than her typical school-wear. Her chest rose gently in a deep breath as her emerald gaze flickered back and forth between her own eyes. She found her bottom lip captured violently between her white teeth as she suddenly glanced around the miniscule bathroom. Were she to stretch her arms out on either side of her body, she could nearly touch both ends of the room.

She used to do it a lot as a child, and gradually got sadder as she took up more and more space.

It was a sad metaphor.

She shouldn't have been nervous.

It was just Ms. Chapman, her teacher, who would teach her about a unit that she could recite backwards and plug in numbers into equations that she could solve in her sleep all because they both wanted to spend a bit of extra time together, alone.

Well, as alone as they could be while in a café in view of the other patrons.

The dream that she'd had the night before didn't help in the slightest.

Hot breath fluctuated and fanned out to caress the shell of Alex's ear. Tantalizing whimpers filled the cramped space and the thrill of anyone walking in and catching the two drove her libido through the ceiling. Dexterous fingers gripped at her back, short nails making tiny crescent marks into the raven haired girl's back. Toned runner's legs flexed around her hips as the blonde in Alex's arms writhed against her touch. A breathy moan echoed throughout the bathroom as Alex hit a particularly sensitive spot with her long fingers. A sun-kissed neck was further exposed as Ms. Chapman threw her head back in ecstasy and the emerald eyed girl supporting the blonde around her waist bent her head down to suck on the revealed skin.

That was as much as she was able to recall, much to her dissapointment, yet she was rather thankful for the lapse in memory because there would be no way that she could focus on her 'tutoring' session with her Physics teacher with the entire dream weighing in on her libido the entire day. With another deep breath and the emptiness of the house bidding her goodbye, Alex grabbed her book bag by the door and started her walk to the bus stop so that she could get to the café in time.

On the bus ride further north where her high school as well as the café resided, the only person on Alex's mind was her teacher. It couldn't have been healthy, the way that the older woman had enraptured her so completely, but Alex was far from complaining when she stepped into the nearly empty coffee shop and spotted the object of her affections sitting in one of the several booths by the window with the morning sunrays highlighting her face as she gazed out into the street. Her azure eyes were made brighter by the illumination; the way that she supported her head by leaning her jaw on her fist made Alex's stomach clench in anticipation as well as desire.

She had to keep it under control.

Piper glanced up at her student's arrival and a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth as she watched the taller girl saunter toward her with all the confidence of a rebellious teenager. Ms. Chapman's red lips immediately caught Alex's attention and she found her gaze dragging from her lips to her enchanting irises as she slowly stepped forward in her combat boots and slid into the seat opposite her physics teacher. She missed seeing Piper in the short amount of time that they were separated from each other. There was no way in hell that either of them would be able to contain their lust for much longer and that fact was becoming painfully obvious the longer that they spent time together. Alex sat her book bag down beside the booth and placed her elbows on the table as the blonde gingerly reached forward and grasped a sugar packet to occupy her hands with a provocative smirk aimed in the younger girl's direction.

By Piper's logic, if she was going to avoid Alex aside from teaching her in the classroom after this session, then she should have as much fun as she could while this lasted.

"Good morning, Miss Vause."

Emerald eyes dilated at the inadvertently sultry tone of her teacher and all of the sudden, the words that had been on her tongue, confident and bold, died right there on her lips.

She had never wanted a dream to be real so badly in her life.

Alex pushed her glasses up on top of her head.

After a moment of opening and closing her mouth as she attempted to remember how to speak, she finally gained her sense back and responded with an unintentionally breathy,

"Morning, Ms. C." After a brief pause, Alex locked eyes with the ocean-like ones in front of her.

"You can just call me Alex, especially since we aren't even at school."

Piper's smirk grew impossibly wider as she leaned forward a bit in her seat to give Alex her undivided attention, even though she wouldn't be taking her eyes off of the girl who had done nothing but invade her mind for the past four days.

Emerald eyes flicked downward once before catching where they had landed and returning upward.

"But, you are still my student." The blonde pointed out, actively keeping her gaze on the forest green eyes ahead of her instead of at the cleavage shown by the low-cut v-neck shirt that the younger girl had worn that day.

"Is that why you haven't been able to take your eyes off me since we met?" The raven haired girl enticed Piper with a taunting and seductive grin on her bare lips that sent a shot of heat straight between the older woman's legs.

_Stop this._

With the clearing of her dry throat and a wipe of her clammy palms on her slacks, Piper pulled a file folder out of her bag and placed it on the table.

"I have all of the notes and worksheets on velocity that you could possibly use. I'm going to order some breakfast. You should really skim over those and make sure you ask me if you have questions when I come back." The blonde stood almost clumsily from her seat, narrowly avoiding slamming her knee into the edge of the table as she rose and stepped up to the counter and habitually smoothed down her dress-suit on her way.

"_Fuck me_." Alex exhaled despondently once her teacher was out of ear shot and standing in line behind a family of four and an old man nearly half of Piper's height. The family of four consisted of a wife and husband with twin toddlers in a double-seated, baby pink stroller. Once the older man had gotten his cup of coffee, black with no sugar if she'd heard him correctly, the mother snuck a glance at the blonde behind her and averted her gaze when Piper caught her looking as the father ordered their food. The woman had auburn hair and pretty green eyes, not as striking as Alex's but they seemed gentle in a way that a new mother's eyes could. Her hands tapped against her pair of jeans and it seemed as if she was forcing herself not to turn around and talk to the woman behind her. Piper caught her gaze again as the woman attempted to fake her next glance as a mere gaze around the café.

"Can I help you with something?" The blonde asked with a bit of sharpness in her voice that she hadn't meant to have. The other woman turned around fully with a bashful half-smile and glanced between her and where Alex sat staring out of the window and tapping the bottom of her pencil against the wooden table of the booth.

"I'm sorry, I just noticed you interacting with the woman over there." She nodded her head in the direction of Piper and Alex's booth. "I just wanted to say that the two of you are a very cute couple." She smiled genuinely and turned back around when Piper failed to come up with a reply. She watched the family leave out of the corner of her eye, the husband with two large bags of food in hand and the mother pushing their children who lie asleep in the stroller.

"Excuse me, miss? How may I serve you today?" The man behind the counter questioned.

Piper blinked once.

Twice.

Her feet carried her forward, heels inaudible at the slow pace that she took those two steps to the register. Her azure eyes skimmed the overhead menu and she decided on two breakfast sandwiches for herself and Alex as well as one hazelnut coffee. As the man turned to prepare her food, the blonde placed her hands on the edge of the counter and turned her head to gaze at her student. Alex was no longer staring out of the window, but instead gazing at her, and didn't even bother to turn away when she was caught. The raven haired teen merely winked with a smirk building slowly onto her naked lips that made Piper's heart drop into her stomach and grow wings that put adolescent butterflies to shame.

The woman had referred to Alex as a woman, not a girl.

It wasn't implausible for her to get the idea that the other girl was much older than she actually was, bearing in mind that Alex carried herself much more maturely than many of her classmates; not to mention that Alex was more filled out than many of the girls in her grade even if they were all seniors. If Piper wasn't her teacher and merely saw her walking down the street, she would think that the emerald eyed girl still observing her casually was in her twenties. Piper turned back to face the menus overhead and tapped her fingers on the counter as she considered it. Would she have pursued Alex if they had met under different circumstances?

Of course.

Would she feel as bad about the age difference had she not ended up being the other girl's teacher?

Probably not.

Alex may have been seventeen, yet to all extent and purpose, the raven haired girl was much more mature mentally and had probably seen more devastating things in those seventeen years than most people would see in a single lifetime. Perhaps it would seem wrong to some, but the emotions that she felt that had stemmed from her student could not be ignored any longer. She wasn't sure what she was going to do to not lose her job or put Alex in any crossfire between her and the dean should anyone find out, but she had to do something lest the raging feelings of undeniable attraction in her stomach and heart drive her to do something that they would both regret.

"Miss? Your food?" The raspy voice of the man serving her registered in her ears finally and as she placed the right amount of bills on the counter and, without waiting for change, grabbed her bag of breakfast and walked over to the booth. Emerald eyes rose at her arrival and she grinned at her teacher involuntarily, causing her scar to curve around her cheek instead of following its original straight line.

She was becoming so sickeningly enamored with this woman.

"What did you get?" The raven haired girl questioned with the raise of her eyebrow and a glance between her teacher and the bags. The blonde merely slid one over to her and gestured for her to open it and see.

Alex's smile faltered as she noted the breakfast sandwich in the decorative paper bag. Her lips pursed together for a moment as she debated over whether or not she should tell Ms. Chapman that she never ate breakfast, not even when she was a child.

Piper noticed.

"What's wrong? You aren't a vegetarian, are you?" The blonde questioned as she sat down across from her student with a small sigh as she considered having to get back up and order a veggie sandwich for her company.

"No, no I'm not vegetarian." Alex chuckled besides herself and her gaze rose from the bag to the mesmerizing blonde in front of her. Pale fingers flicked the bag open once more and she pulled the sandwich out to observe it hesitantly.

"Then what's the matter?"

"I don't eat breakfast." Alex replied timidly as she dropped her gaze back down to the food in her hands. Piper's bubbly laugh exited her lips and she flashed a grin at her student as soon as Alex looked back up at the sound of her amusement.

"Oh, thank god. I thought you were allergic or something. That would have been an interesting conversation with your parents." The blonde shook her head and took a slow sip of her coffee, making a small noise in the back of her throat in delight that made heat rise to Alex's cheeks.

When Piper placed the cup back down onto the table, she leaned forward and slid the papers from in front of Alex to observe them herself.

Piper sighed.

"Yeah, those were really hard. I was waiting for you to come back so you could explain them more." The raven haired girl lied through her teeth.

"Let's cut the bullshit, Alex. Don't play dumb to get my attention, especially when you're as brilliant as you are." Piper stated with her gaze directly merged with the emerald one ahead of her. They simply stared at each other for what might have been seconds, but felt like hours, until Alex dropped her gaze guiltily and nodded twice.

"No, you're right. This was stupid. I should be heading to the building anyway, we all know I need a little more time considering that it's impossible for me to get to class on time." The raven haired girl rambled a bit, ending on a self-deprecating joke as she stood from the booth with her breakfast sandwich in hand.

"Alex-"

"No, really, I should get going."

"You have an hour before class starts and the school is five minutes away." Piper pointed out, hoping that perhaps logic would get the younger girl to see that she was overreacting. The blonde stood also, taking a step toward her student.

Alex stepped backward.

Piper stopped.

"I didn't mean it like that, Al." Piper tried again, her voice a gentle murmur. The use of the nickname caught Alex's attention and coaxed her gaze back up to watch Ms. Chapman with guarded eyes.

"But you're right. How immature was it of me to fake being a complete idiot so that you could have an excuse to spend time with me?"

Lie.

The raven haired girl threw a slight jab at her teacher with a cocked eyebrow and the crossing of her arms within her open leather jacket.

Piper wasn't expecting the flipping of the initiator.

"Excuse me?"

Met with only an expectant look from Alex, the blonde took another step forward. That time, Alex didn't back down, towering over her teacher by four inches, two of them added by the combat boots encasing the taller girl's feet. The height difference shouldn't have been such a turn on for them both, especially not right then.

Their gazes crashed together with all the force of two colliding freight trains and emerald melded together with ocean blue once more for longer than any two normal people would even consider staring into each other's eyes. The tension between them then was palpable and, at the moment, nothing was going to keep their lips from meeting right there in the middle of the empty café aside from the man who served Piper their food fucking everything up.

"Is there a problem over there?" He asked loudly, shattering their moment until it lie in millions of pieces at their feet. Piper slowly took a step backward and turned a cutting glare onto the man who had interrupted them. She knew that she should have been grateful, kissing Alex right then would have been a terrible idea, but that didn't mean that her libido wasn't still raging and she was very much pissed off about him getting in the way.

Alex also sent a withering glare in the older man's direction and, between the two of them, he raised his hands in surrender and backed away much like Kubra had when he walked away from Alex in the hallway the day prior.

She hated him in that moment.

The two women took their seats once more and sat, awkwardly avoiding each other's gaze for a few moments.

"What are we doing?" Alex asked after a while of quiet sitting with no noise aside from the background music of the café playing quietly.

Piper glanced up with those wide blue eyes of hers and observed Alex for quite some time before answering as honestly as she could in that moment.

"I'm confused…by you." The blonde admitted as her long fingers wrapped around her cup of coffee, flexing and relaxing against the container out of nervousness. Forest green eyes traced the outline of her face, noting the curve of the older woman's bottom lip up to the top and then to the defined shape of her relaxed jaw. She would never really get used to how beautiful Ms. Chapman was.

"I'm confused by me, too." The raven haired girl responded with a slight smile tugging at the corner of her lips as her arms crossed even tighter over her chest and one shoulder rose and fell as she considered what she said to be true. She didn't understand her attraction to her teacher any more than the older woman could grasp her attraction to her student. In apology for what happened only a minute prior, Alex continued.

"I'm pretty much the master of handling things completely wrong." She confessed as she allowed her gaze to leave Piper and trail over all of the trinkets in the café that made it look so quaint and old-fashioned. With a shrug and a self-deprecating chuckle, the raven haired girl added, "I'm a fuck up."

"Don't call yourself that. Say screw up instead." Piper joked good-naturedly and actually brought a laugh and a smile out of the other girl. Their hands found themselves intertwined across the table by some unseen force that neither of them had noticed until they felt the warmth of their fingers seeping into each other's skin. Piper lifted Alex's hand and placed a gentle kiss on the back of her knuckles without breaking their gaze.

"You're not a fuck up, sweetheart." The blonde murmured as she brushed the back of her thumb back and forth over the raven haired girl's hand where her lips had been merely seconds ago.

"I'm just as lost as you are. We'll figure it out though, I promise. Even if you don't look like the type to take promises lightly." Piper smirked as she tacked on the last part of her sentence, causing Alex to nod and grin slightly in agreement.

"You're right, I don't." The younger girl chuckled and flicked her gaze between Piper's eyes in wonder. Piper played with the pale fingers in her hands as she regarded her student.

"Then know that I mean that."

Alex believed her.

* * *

The wind whipped auburn hair around a pale face as the woman stood with her hands buried deeply into the pockets of her fall coat and a portable baby monitor on her right hip. A muscled man stepped down the alleyway with long, powerful strides and stopped right in front of her with a stern look on his olive toned face.

She avoided his gaze.

"Did you do what I asked?" He questioned impatiently as if she should have started spouting a report of what she saw as soon as he appeared in front of her. With a quick nod, the woman licked her lips, dried from the wind, and began accounting what she saw when she followed Alex Vause from her home that morning to a café a mere five minutes away from the high school.

"She was with some blonde woman, a bit shorter than her, but taller than me. I tried to get her to say if they were dating or not because when they sat together they seemed like a lot more than just friends." She shrugged her shoulders and hunched further into herself as if that would stop the wind chilling her to her bones.

Her fingers were fucking freezing.

"Did you get a name? Or was that too difficult for you to accomplish?" Fahri sneered with a hard edge to his voice. He wore no coat, only a long sleeved dress shirt and slacks from his day at the high school. The woman dropped her eyes down to her feet guiltily and with a frustrated sigh, he pressed two hundred dollars into her palm after yanking her hand out of her coat pocket. She jolted backward automatically at his forcefulness and whispered a shaky thank you as she scurried back to the front of the upper-classed apartment buildings and back into her home. He had a very good idea of who was distracting Alex Vause, and he would be seeing her very soon.

He had a meeting with the entire science department in the morning.

* * *

**A/N:** Amazing response to the last chapter, holy shit. You guys are great. Thank you so much for the support with this fic, it honestly means the world to me. Don't forget to leave a review with any questions, suggestions, reactions, comments, whatever. I love you guys, man.


	5. Chapter 5

**V**

* * *

The board room was pretty fucking massive to put it frankly.

It was reasonable because, for a large school, there were an equally large amount of teachers in every department so that there was no shortage of educators on hand. The Science, Math, and English departments held the highest amount of instructors and, therefore, each got their own board rooms so that they could have overlapping meetings without dilemma. The Science department, on this day, held their weekly informational meeting in which the teachers debriefed the head of department on their class and the head of department made adjustments to the overall lesson plans as needed.

Piper was fairly early, with only five other teachers in the room at the time, and sat with such an authoritive presence that the other instructors did not meander around the room. They each found a chair and reviewed their notes in the quiet, with nothing but the perpetual ticking of a clock somewhere in every room of the building moving in sync to fill the silence. Aside from the very few teachers whom Piper had grown cordial with, the others did not know her particularly well and were actually intimidated by her attendance. She had incalculable charisma and a winning smile that had nearly landed her the job before her remarkable résumé had done so itself. The dean was not the one in charge of hiring, but it was his boss that worked in a building further into the city who held the true power around Litchfield College Prep.

Piper Chapman was apparently very prestigious.

More and more teachers filed into the room until twenty-nine seats were filled except for the one at the head of the table.

The man that Piper had been waiting with very brutal thoughts to see since yesterday night threw the doors open with all the grandeur that a face slashing jackass could produce in one motion.

She wanted him dead.

"Good morning, Science department!" His faux smile was turned up to maximum levels that did nothing but make Piper's fingers ache to clutch around his thick neck.

His onyx loafers were silent against the thin carpet of the floor as he stepped all the way around the room to reach the chair at the head of the table with his name on a plaque behind it.

The blonde had thought it to be a bit much, but she had yet to know the underlying business relationship between Fahri, the head of the science department, and Kubra, the dean of the school.

Kubra always looked out for his own unless they gave him reason not to.

The man's confident strides ended once he reached his seat and lowered himself down into the black, leather office chair while making eye contact with every single member of the department.

His eyes lingered on the blonde Astrophysics teacher for a moment longer than they had on everyone else, but eventually he turned his chocolate eyed gaze down to the papers in front of him that he had brought in. No one else would have noticed had they not been watching the man as intently as Piper was, but she saw the drawn out eye contact between the two and noted the look of confusion on the other woman's face after Mr. Ayvaz had turned away. His thick fingers sifted through his papers for a moment as he turned his head to the side to skim over the first few lines of several sheets. Finally, he set them down neatly in front of his person and looked around at his colleagues once more.

"Alright, today we're going to start from the freshman science classes to the senior and Advanced Placement classes instead of the other way around, if that's fine with everyone?" He trailed off in a rhetorical question.

He knew that no one would object.

"Mr. Reynolds, Biology, what is the total grade point average of all of your classes?" The foreign man asked with the accented undertone to his diction still prominent if the room's occupants listened hard enough. One of the several Biology teachers spoke gruffly from the other side of Piper, somewhere further down the row of chairs lined at that side of the table. He was a heavy-set man with tufts of blonde and brown hair around an increasingly obvious bald spot. His dress shirt strained at his gut as his meaty hands smoothed down his red and white, thin striped tie out of nervousness.

Piper could spot a bead of sweat forming at his temple.

She smirked.

"Sixty-one point three, sir." The large man muttered into his lap as he kept his gaze averted and facing downward as not to see the scathing look burning from Mr. Ayvaz a hand full of seats away.

"Speak up, Reynolds!" Fahri snapped with an undertone of pure brutality in his voice. The biology teacher, the first of many to come in that meeting, chanced a glance upward at his boss and straightened his tie once more.

He repeated the score with more conviction that time.

"Go to your office and pack your things." Fahri instructed calmly from his end of the table, his thick fingers folded atop his stack of papers as he stared uncaringly at his employee.

"What, why?" Mr. Reynolds questioned with a look of panic in his eyes and a spark of terror slivering through his heart and gripping his spine.

He had three kids.

Piper had seen their pictures at his desk several times since she began working at the school.

The eldest had to have been about ten.

"You're fired."

Piper's smirk fell.

"Excuse me?" She spoke from her side of the long, rectangular table. Her azure eyes flared with an undercurrent of fury directed at the appallingly insensitive jack ass sitting at the head of the table as if he deserved his position and was entitled to it with every cell of his body. Dark eyes turned on her with a raised, bushy eyebrow. Fahri's lips curved upward into a smile as a chuckle filtered through his tilted lips.

"Do you have something you would like to add, Ms. Chapman? Perhaps your classes' total grade average would suffice. Would you mind sharing?"

Piper had to refrain from scowling directly at the man. He knew exactly how great her scores were previously and likely also knew that the average had only risen from the last time that he had asked her about them.

She answered anyway.

"Eighty-nine point seven." Her voice was full and confident. The other teachers were in awe, really, considering that they had trouble keeping their averages out of the low seventies, let alone at nearly ninety percent. Fahri's lips curled out of habit as he leaned back into his desk chair and tented his fingers thoughtfully for a moment.

"That's extremely high, Ms. Chapman… would you mind sharing who exactly has the lowest score in your class?"

If her student's lowest score was even less than Mr. Reynolds' class average, Fahri would let him stay.

The blonde had to refrain from rolling her eyes at the seemingly pointless question, but she answered the man anyway with a tight grip on the pen between her fingers.

"A student named Lisa Grayson. Her average alone, I believe, is a…" Piper thumbed through her folder for a few short seconds until she found the paper of the girl in question.

"Seventy-five point three."

Fahri raised an eyebrow with a controlled pursing of his lips. He had to refrain from laughing outright at the anxiousness emitting from the larger man in waves. The foreign man jutted his angular chin out and turned his derisive glare back onto Mr. Reynolds.

Piper's heart thumped oddly in her chest.

She probably just staked the nail in his coffin.

"Why are you still wasting our time? Out!" Fahri commanded with a frighteningly thunderous and entitled tone to his voice. Piper wanted so badly to say something, anything that would give the man a second chance to keep his job, but the tugging and persistent darkness that lingered beneath her skin and words that tended to be the cause of her raging temper wanted nothing more than for there to be one less person to compete against as the top ranking teacher at the end of the year for a raise that would make her current check pale in comparison.

She watched him leave without a word spoken from anyone.

The other teachers had filed out after their very tense and stifling meeting, leaving only the odd instructor ambling about the spacious area. The Astrophysics teacher was one of them. She was fairly tall, not much smaller than five foot six, with a head of unruly blonde curls, blue eyes, and a slim body lacking much muscle. The head of administration in the science department, Fahri, made his way to the woman with measured steps as if he knew how their conversation would play out and accepted that it would all be in his favor.

He had done his research.

Ms. Nichole lost her fiancée, promised to each other until they could truly be married, to a fatal car accident when she was twenty-nine years old, three months before the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York.

Her partner had been nineteen.

That, paired with the physical description given by that incompetent woman whom he sent to follow Alex into the coffee shop and his prior knowledge of Alex's preference for older partners, women specifically, gave him enough evidence to know that this was the woman monopolizing Alex and being the reason why the teenager had said she wasn't sure about their business any longer one night over the phone.

Her blue eyes shot up immediately at his presence and she took a step back out of habit with an anxious smile playing at her lips.

"Mr. Ayvaz, can I help you with something?" She questioned. Her cheeks were round and rosy and dimpled when she talked.

"Yes, I'd like to meet with you after today. Come by my office at four. Don't be late." His last words rang with finality as he shouldered past her and stepped out of the conference room. The shorter woman swallowed heavily and wrapped her arms around her torso in a gesture that suggested she was protecting herself. Her sea blue eyes followed him as he pushed the door open and exited.

* * *

"_Located by reporters, students as well as teachers at Litchfield College Prep refused any comment on the disappearance of thirty-two year old Astrophysics teacher, Averie Nichole, this Sunday morning. If anyone has any information about the victim, please call the number below. Back to you, Josh."_

"_This week on sports, we have.._."

Alex had heard the television from her bedroom as soon as she woke up, the sound and words not clicking together until after she had gone to the kitchen for a cup of water. She nearly sprinted the short distance to the pathetically small screen. She knew of Ms. Nichole, the sweet Astrophysics teacher whom she would have had as an instructor had she not failed Physics the year prior. The pattern was far too fresh in Alex's mind and immediately she knew that it had to be Kubra or Fahri's work. Kubra would be especially irritable, Fahri would be especially violent, and then whoever the cause of their agitation was would become especially dead after being missing for nearly three days.

Kubra and Fahri had both been very antsy recently.

Her almost-teacher would be dead by Wednesday.

The urge to help and tell someone, anyone really, consumed her every time. Alex wanted to save the poor woman, of course she did, but she also valued her life far more than she valued a clear conscience. Her hands gripped the back of the futon, folded into its couch position, and her head dropped with a heavy sigh.

Why would Fahri or Kubra target Ms. Nichole?

It took her a moment to figure out exactly what would make the two men pissed enough to take yet another life.

The red solo cup of water in her right hand creaked and tore beneath her fingers when she finally got it.

The Astrophysics teacher resembled Ms. Chapman enough to either be a warning to Alex or merely a massive fuck-up on Fahri or Kubra's part. If it was a mistake, the raven haired girl suffered the dilemma of telling them that they have the wrong person and allowing them one extra step in Piper's direction, or allowing the woman's death in order to keep her Physics teacher safe.

"_Fuck me_." Alex cursed loudly at the realization and then cursed once more under her breath when she noticed the water spilling down her arms, onto her jeans and then the floor.

What the fuck was she supposed to do?

There was no way in hell that she would hand Ms. Chapman to them on a silver platter by saying that they have the wrong woman, but then again letting an innocent woman die just so that she could be selfish and keep Piper protected gnawed at the inside of her gut like guilt never had dared to do before.

Ms. Chapman had made her soft, she could feel it.

She put that particular dilemma on hold for the moment in order to consider the fact that she should probably warn Piper about the fact that there was a hit out, a misplaced one, granted, for her death. Fahri or Kubra would realize eventually that they had murdered the wrong woman after wasting thousands to cover up the evidence and have one of their blindly following drug mules take the fall for it.

They would try again, of course, but how was Alex to explain to Ms. Chapman why exactly the principal and head director of the science department wanted her six feet under? She refused to even consider trying to tell Piper that, since she was fifteen, she had been pushing drugs first throughout the neighborhood and then around the state. Once she graduated, Kubra would likely move her to the national cartel and then eventually she would work her way up to international status.

She had not planned to have a normal life.

Alex Vause was destined for greater, always had been.

Her shoes squeaked as she walked to the kitchen for paper towels.

After the spilled water was cleaned up and the poor excuse for a television was shut off, she had come to a decision about both of her most prioritized situations. This was Piper's life she was thinking about.

She wouldn't save Ms. Nichole.

She would tell Piper about her life as a drug mule.

The pale girl shifted her glasses down to rest atop her nose with a deep sigh and a quick look at the clock on the wall. She would go further into the city for her mother's birthday gift like she had originally planned to do that day, but the entire time she would think of nothing but how to tell Piper that she is probably the most troublesome person the blonde will ever meet in her life.

* * *

The wind whipped onyx tresses about Alex's face as she walked quickly down the breezy streets of New York, passing by shop after shop until her eyes caught a gold necklace in a storefront window. She slowed down and stood in front of it with a furrowed brow as she scanned for the price.

Seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars for a chain with a diamond to swing prettily from the bottom of it.

Alex's eyes nearly rolled out of her head.

She kept walking.

Without glancing around her first, obviously she wouldn't have noticed the shorter blonde speed walking with her bent over her phone in one hand and a yoga mat tucked beneath her opposite arm.

"Shit, watch where-" Piper stopped and her heart stuttered in her chest at the sight of Alex Vause standing in the middle of the sidewalk with her hair blowing around her face and a flushed tint to her pale cheeks.

"Alex…" The blonde trailed off breathlessly as she crouched down to pick up her dropped phone, all the while never taking her eyes off of her very attractive student.

"I'm so sorry; I swear I'm not as much of a klutz as I used to be." The pale girl laughed and gave that heart twisting smile that Piper loved so much.

"You sure about that?" The azure eyed woman jabbed playfully and the smile on Alex's lips grew impossibly wider. The air was only slightly chilly, yet warm where they stood in the sunlight. Alex shrugged one shoulder and shook her head.

"No, not really."

_Tell her._

"So, what are you doing out here?" Piper questioned with the slight raise of her eyebrow in curiosity. Pale fingers tapped on her thigh as she rocked back on her heels out of nervousness.

"Finding a birthday gift for my mom. It's in a couple of weeks, and I want to get it now so that I won't be scrambling to find her something last minute." The taller girl explained, her eyes digging into Piper's out of some pure magnetic force. She could never take her eyes off of Ms. Chapman.

_Tell her._

"That's sweet of you. What are you getting her?" Alex's forest green eyes dropped to the other woman's lips and she couldn't be bothered to move them, even when said lips tilted upward after Piper noticed where her gaze had gone.

"I'm not sure… Are you hungry? I'm starving." She didn't know what the fuck she was doing. Yes, she had come to buy her mother a gift, but she would never in her life pass up an opportunity to spoil Piper Chapman rotten, even if she wasn't exactly hers to spoil.

_What are you doing? Tell her_!

"Wait, you're coming back from yoga? Do people eat after yoga?" Alex rambled, her palms were clammy and her face seemed far too concentrated as if the younger girl was thinking too hard.

Piper chuckled and absentmindedly rested her hand on the pale girl's forearm, which slid down until their fingers were intertwined and Alex's face was tinged red.

"Relax, Miss Vause. I'd love to eat."

Alex's heart leaped into her throat and the poor girl could do nothing but nod her head and gently pull her hand away to straighten out her leather jacket and brush her hair back from out of her face.

_Fucking idiot._

Piper Chapman was going to kill her, and she couldn't have been more okay with dying.

* * *

After their meal of deliciously greasy pizza, paid for by Alex's drug money even though Piper nearly caused a scene in the middle of the restaurant about being able to pay for her own food, the two meandered around a walking and biking trail that led over a bridge and wrapped around nearly twelve miles of land.

The bridge arched over a pond filled with lily pads and countless plants, all with names unknown to her. Alex neither saw nor heard any animals; however the distant noise of honking cars and buzzing city streets provided an almost soothing background track to their scenery. Her emerald eyes turned on Piper, observing the intense blonde's profile as the wind shifted her wavy hair around her shoulders and her cerulean eyes peered into the distance as if she could spend eternity lost in the clouds.

"You're beautiful." The words were out of Alex's mouth before she could even grasp that her lips had parted and when Piper turned that ocean-like gaze onto her, one that she would happily drown in, her breathing stopped. She was so sure that Piper would give her a speech about how student-teacher relationships were never to surpass the classroom and that anything more than acquaintanceship between them was completely unprofessional, but she didn't.

Instead, she did something that made her stomach tie up in knots that boy scouts would be envious of. Her sun-kissed hand rose so that her long, deft fingers could caress the left side of her face. Ms. Chapman's thumb brushed over her scar with a touch as gentle as the wind flowing between them. The blonde's other hand guided her student's glasses up off of her face to rest on the top of her head. Piper tilted her head upward with a passionate shine in her eyes and pressed her pink lips to the raised, jagged skin of Alex's scar. She didn't care that they weren't acceptable, because she wanted Alex more than she had wanted anyone in her entire life. She hadn't even gone to meet with whatever asshole her mother had set her up with for the day prior because she couldn't get Alex out of her head long enough to even pretend to tolerate him. When she pulled away, the taller girl's eyes glinted with unshed tears before she blinked them out of existence.

"You're beautiful, too." Piper murmured only an inch or so away from the younger girl.

There was no one else on the earth but them.

With a sudden surge of confidence that tore through her chest with all the violence and powerful force of a supernova, Alex pressed her lips against Piper's hungrily, wrapping her leather clad arms around the shorter woman's waist and pulling her flush against her body. A knee-weakening sound emitted from the back of the blonde's throat in appreciation as she gripped onto the front of the taller girl's jacket to push their bodies impossibly closer. Without the rationality that it was impossible, Piper wanted their bodies to be so intertwined that they merged together somehow. She wanted their souls to collide and never separate so that she wouldn't have to breathe in anyone other than the girl who had captured her mind so completely. Sun kissed hands rose to grip onto Alex's raven tresses and pull the younger girl down a bit closer to her mouth. The emerald eyed girl's tongue caressed Piper's bottom lip and she groaned pitifully into the blonde's mouth when their tongues clashed together finally. She had wanted this more than anything since one of the first days of school.

It had been on both of their minds all of this time.

Eventually they mutually pulled back, breathless and gasping for air, to look at each other with looks mixed between awe and terror.

What did that kiss mean?

What did they mean?

And why did both of them want nothing more than to do it over and over again for the rest of their lives?

"Sorry." Alex took it upon herself to apologize, for lack of any other words to form aside from that one. Piper's lip was trapped sinfully between her white teeth as she shook her head and smiled a bit while looking up at Alex.

"No apology necessary." She murmured. Her hands were still tangled in Alex's hair as she gazed into her deep green eyes.

The breeze shifted a strand of hair to catch in the taller girl's eyelashes.

Piper slowly brushed it away.

They stood in silence for a long moment; nothing but the wind moved around them.

"I need to tell you something…" Alex finally got out after having the inner debate with herself since she left the house that afternoon.

"Is it about the Astrophysics teacher? I heard about it this morning. Fuck, that's so tragic…" The blonde trailed off and her gaze lingered out over the pond that the stood over, locked in an embrace.

"Yeah, it's about why it might have happened… You know, who might have done it." Alex paused for a moment to gauge Piper's reaction; however the blonde was far too uncomfortable with the discussion of death in any form to take their conversation seriously.

So, of course she joked about it.

"What, Fahri's at it again? You know he fired a man the other day because his classes' total average was low at the beginning of the school year? The kids have barely been in school, there's no way to base his teaching off of that score. I'm starting to think he just wants less teachers in the science department." The cerulean eyed woman smirked and chuckled, making Alex lose her nerve to mention anything because this was really happening and Piper Chapman was real in her arms and she didn't want much else other than to keep her safe just as much as she wanted to keep her in the dark.

She would confront Fahri herself on Monday.

She wasn't going to lose Piper.

Not so soon after she finally got her.

* * *

**A/N:** So sorry for this late update, my week has been busy as shit and I haven't had much time to sit down and write. I'm really excited to get to the heart of this fic, which is coming soon, and for you all to be able to read what I have planned. Thank everyone so much for your support and very sweet reviews! I'm not too sure how I feel about this chapter, honestly, but let me know what you think of it in a review please. Reactions, comments, suggestions, questions, etc. Love you all very much and I hope you've enjoyed chapter 5.


	6. Chapter 6

**VI**

* * *

Alex Vause was appallingly early to school on Monday.

Her train had gotten her to the large; brick walled school building at six thirty in the morning in order for her to properly confront Fahri about the disappearance of the Astrophysics teacher, Ms. Nichole. It was bitingly cold so early in the morning and she was mentally berating herself for not thinking to grab her trusty leather jacket before she left the house. Her long sleeved, navy blue t-shirt fit her torso snugly with wonderful quality for something that had come from the dingy thrift store around the corner from her house. There were many other much better thrift stores, ones with clothes that didn't smell like they hadn't left someone's basement in months.

Of course she could have afforded to update her wardrobe, but even her astoundingly busy and frazzled mother would notice eventually and Alex was not up for explaining just why she had thousands of dollars sent her way every couple of months from the dean of her school, and no minimum waged job would believably pay her that well. She and Kubra had been close ever since he recruited her in the pale girl's freshman year of high school. He cared for her, honestly he did, and looked out for her like the father that Alex had never gotten the chance to know. He had never hurt her like Fahri had, and had only ever been furious with her when she fucked with his profit.

She was old enough now to understand just how he singled kids out. He found a child struggling in their classes, lagging behind the others for whatever reason, and snatched them up with promises of enormous amounts of cash and enough perks to be able to get through school without a single difficulty. Their grades were merely on paper as what they earned; however, in the system their grades showed as those of top ranked students. Kubra hadn't tweaked Alex's ACT scores, not that he could have anyway. Those were high all on their own. Alex was still unsure of how he managed to do all of that and stay undetected, but she couldn't say that she didn't admire his drive for success.

Alex had made it to Fahri's office door without interruption.

She knocked.

Several beats passed before the handle twisted beneath her hand and the door swung open to reveal a disheveled looking Fahri. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair mussed with his tie askew and his slacks wrinkled. Bushy eyebrows drew downward as dark brown eyes looked Alex up and down until a look of recognition flashed across is face.

A sneer twisted his lips as he took a step backward to let the younger girl inside of his office. Alex's shoulder brushed his as she entered and the tall girl took her typically long strides over to his desk, leaning back on the edge of it and crossing one leg over the other. Pale fingers fiddled with the edge of the desk and her forest green eyes darted everywhere but to the man standing in the center of the room with the door locked and a bottle of whisky in his left hand. Fahri's lavender dress shirt had an alcohol stain on the front from where he had likely missed his mouth tilting the bottle to his lips.

Alex finally met his eyes with disgust.

"So you kidnap or murder a teacher of the school that you work at and then show up the next week drunk? Did you even go home, or have you been here all weekend?" The taller girl sneered with a slight flare of her nostrils and her arms crossed tightly across her chest. Fahri took a wobbly step toward her and allowed himself a moment to find his balance before responding.

"You don't know a fuckin' thing about what we did." His speech was so obviously slurred that Alex nearly felt bad for the man, drinking himself into stupidity after a long weekend of violence and murder.

Yeah, right.

"I know enough to realize that you harmed an innocent woman." Alex hissed, her arms falling down by her sides as she advanced toward Fahri with a raging temper flaring beneath her flesh. Fahri's bleary eyes did not even focus on her, but on the scar trailing from beneath her left eyebrow to the left side of her chin, barely grazing the corner of her mouth.

He smirked.

"She tell you that scar was pretty, Ally-girl?" His voice was gruff from his lack of sleep and increase in hard liquor.

He reeked of alcohol.

His arm extended and Alex didn't move away when his large, rough hand grabbed her chin and tilted her face from side to side as if he were inspecting an item intended for purchase. A drunken grin pulled the corners of his lips up and his laugh was loud and booming throughout the office.

Alex yanked away from his grip.

"No one's gonna love you looking like that!" He guffawed, kneeling over himself with laughter that made crimson burn around the edges of Alex's vision. The bottle of whiskey slipped from his inept fingers and crashed to the floor in a resulting shower of glass and liquor. The laughter cut off abruptly, followed by an, "Oh, shit."

Dark eyes turned upward to look at Alex before the older man burst into laughter once more at his own drunkenness.

Alex didn't have time for his shit.

"_Listen_! Do you have any idea how fucking reckless you're being? Are you trying to get everyone involved in this dumb _business_ locked away? Jesus, you can't even understand me because you're too busy being _drunk_ to be anything but a useless-!"

_Smack_.

Silence.

Breathing.

Alex's breaths came quickly; the phantom pain in her chest from the broken rib that never healed properly was what made hers the loudest. They were shaky sounds emitting from her lungs as her pale hand covered her cheek where she had been struck. She could feel rather than see the red handprint marking the left side of her face. The hit had knocked her head to the side, and after a beat of stillness, she turned forward to face Fahri once more. Their eyes locked for but a split second, fiery green ones burning with a rage that took over her entire body, before Alex's arm cocked back and burst forward in the time that it took Fahri to blink. Her fist connected with his throat in a punch far more fatal than she had ever intended it to be. The older man's eyes bulged as he struggled for breath, clutching at his neck with fingers much thicker than Alex's.

She didn't help him.

It was as if Alex was trapped behind a glass window, watching the man before her gasp for air and become unable to breathe any longer. The vein in his forehead seemed to be pulsing and the tendons in his neck bulged out while he writhed on the floor amongst broken glass and spilled alcohol. All of the noises through her ears sounded a million miles away from her watching the light behind Fahri's eyes flicker and die out.

She couldn't move.

It was unclear how much time had passed when Kubra arrived, but Alex had never been so relieved to see anyone in her entire life. It took her a brief moment to remember that their offices were connected and it was very likely that he heard at least the end of their argument if he was only just arriving at the school.

The pale girl stood in the middle of the office, arms locked around her torso as if that would be enough to keep her from going insane with fear, and Kubra held her.

He stroked her hair and placed a kiss atop her head.

She hadn't realized that she was crying until he used the sleeve of his dress shirt to wipe the tears from her pale cheeks.

"Go to class. I will take care of this." He murmured to the otherwise silent room, nothing but the ticking of the clock above the desk to fill the quiet.

It was a constant reminder of time perpetually moving, even when a life has gone still.

"Class started?" Alex questioned.

Her voice was rough.

Had she been screaming?

Maybe that's why Kubra'd had her face buried in his chest.

"Half an hour ago." He responded quietly, brows furrowed as his dark eyes flickered between both of hers.

How long had she been standing there?

"Go on. I've got this." Kubra urged her once more before sending her off out of the office and into the hallway. Alex stood at the door after it shut for a bit longer in order to try and regain her composure, or at least stop the trembling in her fingers and legs, and could hear Kubra speaking to whom she could only assume was a cleaner over the phone.

She had heard of them many times, though not through television and books like most people her age had. Cleaners were specifically charged with removing all evidence of dead bodies and how they might have become dead to begin with.

She felt her stomach curl at the thought of Fahri or Kubra calling a cleaner for Ms. Nichole, and then gagged due to lack of anything in her stomach but water at the thought that she caused Kubra to call a cleaner for Fahri.

It sank in that she was the reason for both of those deaths.

Both hands flew to her mouth right before the water that she had drank from that morning came right back up her throat and seeped between her fingers onto the hallway floor.

* * *

"I heard that you were sick this morning. How are you feeling?" Ms. Chapman questioned as soon as Alex entered the classroom for eighth period Physics. She was the first one there, unsurprisingly, considering that she hadn't even bothered to attend her seventh period class. She could have gone straight home, but she didn't want to inadvertently avoid Piper as a result of her avoiding her responsibilities. A small smile tugged at Alex's lips at the concern smeared across her teacher's face.

"It could have been worse." Alex replied, all the while trying to evade thoughts of the reason for her sickness earlier in the day. The janitor had actually been pleased that it was merely water, and therefore easier to clean up.

He didn't ask questions.

Piper stepped around from behind her desk to stand in front of it, pulling herself up to sit on the edge of the surface. Her legs crossed at the ankles as she raked her gaze over Alex's lean frame.

"I'm glad that you're okay." The blonde murmured, never breaking eye contact with the younger girl. After a beat of silence, she continued.

"Did you hear about Mr. Ayvaz quitting?" She spoke with a grin pulling the corners of her mouth upward in joy at what she thought was to be a good turn of events. Instead, Alex's slight smile fell and her stomach churned once more with nothing to heave up but stomach acid. She found her head shaking of its own volition and nearly fell into her seat.

Piper opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, but her teeth clicked shut after the first handful of students began to flow in with a constant stream of low chatter and quiet laughter. The blonde attempted eye contact with the younger girl, but Alex's head was down on her desk and there was no way to tell if she was alright or not. Piper stepped back around to the side of her desk closest to the board and began to write the class' agenda for the day in her scrawling cursive with a black dry-erase marker.

* * *

The bell ringing had caused everybody to jump out of their seat in excitement for the rest of their day free of education but for two. The room cleared out in less than two minutes and Alex's head was still on her desk. The blonde hadn't disturbed her during the entire period, realizing that perhaps making the best student in her class focus on force and Newton's laws on the state of motion was a poor idea. So that left the two of them there after the room was otherwise cleared out with Alex's soft breaths coming from her desk in time with the clock on the wall.

Still moving forward.

"Al?" Piper's voice was gentle even in the silence, but the taller girl didn't stir. The blonde rose from her seat behind the desk and slowly made her way over to her student's table. Her heels clicked on the linoleum in measured paces until she reached the younger girl.

"Alex?"

Silence.

A sun-kissed hand went to rest on the pale girl's forearm and stopped mid-way before dropping back down to its owner's side. The kiss that the two had shared only a day ago hung in the air like a thick curtain. God forbid that Piper begins to think that their act of passion the day before had been a mistake, one that could very well ruin her life.

That's what she thought Alex was upset about, anyway.

Oh, how wrong and self-absorbed she had been.

"You can't stay in here all day, sweetheart."

Alex's head rose slowly and she stared up through slit eyes at her Physics teacher, arms uncrossing until her elbows peeked over the edge of her desk on each side and her fingers linked in the center. The blonde was slightly taken aback by the demeanor of her student, but quickly reined in her surprise.

"Why the fuck not? You kiss me and all of the sudden I'm just another student to you?"

Her voice was rough.

"First of all, you kissed me!" The older woman whisper-yelled with the furrowing of her eyebrows at the turn that their, mostly one-sided, conversation had taken.

"And second of all, I never said that. Why would you think-?"

"Because you realized that life is short and that yesterday was a mistake, so why would you waste time on me and have any more of an obligation to some screw up than you do to anyone else?" The younger girl scowled at Piper's lost expression.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about how you're supposed to fucking help me and you're basically telling me to get out of your classroom!" Alex's voice was steadily rising and the panic that swelled in Piper's gut at anyone hearing their conversation outside of the door drove her even harder to defuse the situation.

"Help you with what, Alex? I can't help you if I don't know what the problem is." The blonde questioned, her eyebrows slanting upward with that crease forming between them that Alex typically would have found endearing, but at the moment only was frustrated by. Forest green eyes scanned the room, checking the classroom door to make sure that they were completely in private.

"Fahri didn't quit his job." She murmured, voice thick with the burn of tears pricking her eyes.

Piper frowned and tilted her head slightly with her lips parted in the beginnings of a question.

"He's dead." Alex answered before she could ask.

Cerulean eyes bulged and a sun-kissed hand flew to her chest in shock.

"No-"

"He died this morning."

Piper searched the emerald eyes before her. Her gaze flickered between Alex's eyes in search of any sign of deception, no matter how unlikely it was that Alex would joke about something so dire.

"How…?"

"I'm not sure." Alex lied easily. That one was a warm summer day compared to the lies she'd been forced to come up with before.

She tried not to think about how fucked up that was.

"You can't tell anyone. I mean it, Piper."

The shock of Alex calling her by her first name was enough to grab her attention completely if it wasn't given before. It was different, yet not at all unpleasant.

"I won't. I promise."

Alex slowly stood from her desk, towering over her teacher now that they were both on their feet. Her pale hand rose and she brushed the back of her fingers over Piper's cheek as a frown marred her face in deep consideration.

If there was any time to tell Ms. Chapman about the danger that she could have been in, that was her moment.

She didn't.

* * *

Kubra hadn't ever visited Alex's house before, no times that she had been aware of at least, yet she wasn't even slightly surprised that the older man knew where she lived. Her shock was more at the fact that he had shown up unannounced that night with take-out and a mouthful of secrets that fate decided it was time to share.

They sat on Alex's futon, still folded into a couch, and the younger girl picked at her food in silence. The pathetically tiny television played background noise to their quiet chewing and eventually, Kubra pushed his styrofoam box to the side and folded his hands over his stomach after leaning back into the futon.

"Alex." He murmured into the near-silence of her living room.

"What?" The pale girl responded in a voice that was alarmingly monotone.

Then again, what could he expect for a girl who had just committed her first murder nearly twelve hours prior? The feeling that she was no better than the man who had permanently scarred her face to teach her a lesson couldn't have sat well in her conscience.

"I want you to tell me exactly what you and Fahri were arguing about this morning. It may not seem relevant, but I need to know that I was justified in protecting you for murdering a man that I have worked closely with for twenty years." The undertone of anger was evident in his voice, but she wasn't sure if it was completely directed toward her.

"I trust in you Al, I always have, but I have to know that this was warranted."

The pale girl took a shaky breath through her nose and finally turned her eyes onto the man who never failed to pick her up when she stumbled down a rocky path.

"He was drunk and he kept provoking me… and then he slapped me and I just reacted." She murmured with a far-off look in her eyes as if she were reliving the moment right then.

"My fist just, like, shot out and hit him in the neck and the next thing I knew, he was heaving on the floor." Alex's breath hitched in her throat as she recalled the look of dread on the man's face as he struggled to breathe on the floor of his own office.

"And I didn't help him… I just watched him die." The younger girl's voice became heavy with emotion as it truly dawned on her what she had done that day.

She murdered a man.

Accident or not, Fahri was still dead and it was still her fault.

Kubra's hand gripping her chin before she could even panic completely and suddenly they were locked in eye contact that shouldn't have felt as comforting as it did.

"Relax. I took care of the body. No one has to know."

But Alex would know.

And that would be enough to drive her insane.

Yet, she merely nodded in agreement to his assurance and tried her best not to dwell on how Fahri's eyes bulged or how the vein in his forehead seemed to strain against his skin as he writhed on the ground, eyes pleading for her to save him from herself.

"Why do you always take care of me?" Several moments of quiet had passed in between Kubra's words and Alex's question, but the meaning of what she was inquiring needed no further explanation.

_Her knees were scraped._

_The girls liked to play 'Chase the pigsty' after school was let out and her teachers didn't much care that she didn't feel safe leaving the school by herself. She wasn't allowed to stay inside and read until most people had cleared out like she wanted to, but she was allowed to be chased around by a group of girls in name-brand shirts and jeans that came with rips in them as opposed to ones that developed over time like her own._

_She was out of breath and hiding behind the school. She was thin enough to fit in the space between the wall and the dumpster. Alex was tall, yes, but she was also very thin her freshman year. Her hair wasn't long enough to be of hindrance or give away her spot; those same girls whom she had gone to middle school with had cut a chunk of it out during recess a year ago and her mom used scissors to even the rest out as she cursed under her breath in words that Alex knew better than to repeat. It had only grown out to just brush her collar bone._

_Her breath was lost as she waited with a racing heart and prayed to whoever would listen that they wouldn't find her that time._

_She hated going to school._

_Footsteps crunching in the gravel made her squeeze her eyes shut in unadulterated terror._

_"Why are you behind the dumpster?"_

_She slowly opened her eyes._

_It was the Dean._

_"These girls were chasing me." She answered quietly; barely audible through the wind that was blowing her hair around her face._

_"You must be quite the catch." The tall man replied with a charming grin and a chuckle. He lent his hand for her to grab and helped her to her feet. Alex's green eyes were wide and cautious of this potential ally, however she knew better than to get her hopes up. Her hands reached up and adjusted the glasses that were a bit too large for her fourteen year old face._

_"Who's coming to pick you up?" He questioned after her silence._

_"No one. I take the train."_

_Kubra nodded and looked down at the scrawny girl who was a bit tall for her age._

_"Do you want to tell me the names of these girls who were chasing you?"_

_A shake of her head._

_"Alright then. What's your name, again?"_

_"Alex."_

_The taller man smiled warmly and nodded as he stuffed his large hands into the pockets of his slacks._

_He knew exactly who she was._

_"Why don't you walk to the front of the school with me so that they don't bother you?" He suggested and without a word, the raven haired girl followed behind him to the front gates of the school building._

_She hadn't been chased again since._

Kubra's mouth opened and closed as he considered just how he would go about answering her question, and eventually, he sat up straight and leaned his elbows on his thighs as he began to talk.

"It started with your mother. You were only a freshman, very talented academically with no motivation to work hard for high grades. So when you started falling behind in all of your classes, I began to watch you interact with the school environment around you and decided that I wanted to recruit you to help out in my business. You know how this process goes by now. When I called your mother in under the impression that we were having a meeting about your low grades, I snuck in questions that gave me an idea of your home I didn't know was how far your mother was willing to go to secure your future." Kubra paused for a moment and tapped the tips of his fingers together in thought. He glanced over at Alex, who was staring at him with furrowed eyebrows and a look of complete attention.

"She made me a proposition that I didn't particularly want to refuse…" He broke eye contact with Alex at that part, unwilling to see the look of shock and disgust in the eyes of the young girl that he has begun to see as his own child.

"So in exchange for her…support, I ensured that you would encounter no real trouble at school and that you would graduate with a chance at a great college. Then, as the years went on I grew to see you as a daughter rather than a drug mule. Particularly after you came to me your junior year devastated because the meeting with your father had gone horribly. And now here we are, me bringing you burgers and mozzarella cheese sticks and cleaning up your first kill."

The foreign man attempted to make light of their situation, however the information was too raw and the blood on her hands too new for any of what he said to be considered humorous.

"You've been _fucking my mother_?" Alex gritted out in absolute disbelief. Her forest green eyes were narrowed in something between betrayal and disgust.

"I don't know whether to be pissed because no one bothered to tell me or jealous because you clearly see her more than I do!" The hurt in her tone was so evident that the olive toned man sitting beside her on the futon quickly jumped to do damage control.

"I really do care about her, Al-"

"Get out."

"Alex-

"_Get_ out." The final word was spoken in a threatening whisper that sent a flash of worry down the taller man's spine. He nodded several times and stood from his seat on her couch. There was more that he wanted to say, anything that could calm her down, but he figure that it was best to let her cool off first.

He stood and shuffled to the door without a word.

She didn't tell him goodbye.

How was she supposed to feel about this man who had looked out for her since she was fourteen fucking her mother in some sort of sick arrangement that acted as a security plan for her future? Who does that?  
Her stomach churned again at the thought of it and suddenly she regretted eating anything. She didn't even want to think about the fact that she had kissed her teacher the day before and there was no way in hell that she was even letting her mind touch on what she had done earlier that morning. She really should stop wondering how fucked up her life can get before the universe continues trying to show her.

She had only gotten five minutes or so to attempt to clear her head of all of the things that were simultaneously giving her migraines before the front door opened and she saw the last person that she needed to encounter in that moment.

"Mom…"

* * *

**A/N**: Very sorry for the long wait in updates recently, I've just been trying to find the time to sit down and write. Hopefully I should be freed up soon, but if not I won't make you guys wait longer than a week for an update. Love all of you so much for the kind reviews and the support that this story is getting. Don't forget to leave a review, please. I hope you enjoyed this chapter!


	7. Chapter 7

**VII**

* * *

The taller woman pressed the front door shut with her hip, brows furrowed as she slowly approached Alex after flicking the lock with her free hand. Alex's forest green eyes widened as she quickly realized exactly what she had gotten herself into.

"You wanna tell me why I just saw your Dean leaving my home? Why he was alone with my teenaged daughter at nine at night?" The woman's voice was hard and cutting, however the look behind her eyes revealed nothing but unadulterated panic and fear.

Perhaps the thought that he would one day want more than her offered sexual favors had overrun her brain more often than when she merely lay down to sleep in the early hours of the morning. The older woman dropped down a plastic bag of food, from where Alex could not decipher, and took further steps toward her daughter.

The apartment wasn't that large.

Alex schooled her face into one of utter indifference and arched a neatly trimmed eyebrow as further signal for her mother to elaborate on just what was so bad about being caught with the Dean of students leaving out of her house. The older woman scowled at her silence and those sneaker clad feet of hers were soundless against the floorboards as she reached Alex's position on the futon.

"You fucking answer me, Alex!" She snapped, purely from an alarm that simmered deep in the pit of her own gut at what she had potentially exposed her daughter to.

"He was here to talk about my improvement in my classes, okay?" She spouted the first lie to come to mind, and it was startling how easily it slipped from her tongue.

"You couldn't discuss that at school?" The taller woman was slowly fuming several feet away from Alex, a heat behind her eyes that expressed nothing more than perilous emotions. Alex shrugged one shoulder with an unimpressed quirk of a dark eyebrow above her glasses.

Diane's olive toned eyes raked over her daughter's scar.

"What the fuck made you think it was fine to let your adult, male teacher into this house?" Diane's voice rose with every few words, insubstantially drowning out the sound of the microscopic television playing in the background. The woman's face, equally as pale as her daughter's, reddened with an unfamiliar mixture of anger and panic. She knew that her agreement with Kubra nearly three years prior would come back to haunt her eventually, but he helped them when she needed. Diane wasn't the type to take handouts.

She wanted what she owned to be worked for and paid off by her own blood and sweat, not someone else's pity. As a result, she rarely went to Kubra for help with money or food purely to maintain her pride; however, times had not improved lately. The last thing that she even wanted to fathom was that Kubra had decided that her body was not enough, and that he wanted her daughter's as well.

If only she knew that a drug cartel was just as binding.

Alex's eyebrows drew downward at the look on her mother's face. Perhaps they did not see each other often, but she knew the older woman well enough to know the difference between the stern gaze of 'You're in trouble' and the panicked doe-eyed look of 'I'm afraid for your life'. Of course, the difference at that moment was that she now knew of her mother's and Kubra's arrangement.

Obviously she couldn't tell her mother that.

"What's the big deal? You're never here anyway, so why does it matter? I could have had hundreds of guys in this house and after all of these years you would've never known!" The rebuttal started as a mere segue from the subject of Kubra, the topic was making her nauseous, however Alex's true feelings toward their situation shone through in the end. The truth was that she was fed up with her mother working such long hours and never being around for her. She was sick of having to raise herself, and she wanted nothing more than to have a mother who actually was around to give a damn for once.

She knew that her mother loved her.

Diane wouldn't have worked three jobs to support the two of them if she didn't love her daughter, but Alex merely wanted a mom that was _around_. She wanted a mom that would have packed her lunches in grade-school, or the kind that would let her join a sport at school and come watch her play and be the biggest fan out in the stands. Alex was nearly eighteen years old and to that day she had yet to see her mother ever really sit down and talk with her about anything other than how tight money was or how she should brag about to her father to all of the girls who used to talk shit about her for being poor.

She never was around for Alex to ask why she didn't talk about or obsess over boys like the other girls in her grade, she wasn't there when Alex got lured into a drug cartel ran by her Dean in her sophomore year, and at that moment, Alex couldn't even ask for help from her mother in terms of coping with the fact that she had physically taken someone's life earlier that day. The last part was a bit implausible to say the least, but it was the principal of the thing.

The elder woman's left eye twitched.

It was a reaction that Alex had noted at a fairly young age and it occurred every time that she had said something that was just too far over the line.

The next five seconds happened in a blur.

Alex was not certain how, but she ended up on the far end of the room, straddling the doorway separating the kitchen from the living room with wide eyes and a lurch of her heart. Her mother was one breath away from her with a pale finger jabbed into her chest, right below her collar bone.

Alex was more terrified of her mother in that moment than she had ever been in her life. The woman to birth her had never been a particularly violent person; she knew that much for sure. Alex must have gained her temper from her absent father, which she could never clarify because she would be damned if she ever set foot within a ten foot radius of that man again. That being said, whatever it took to set her mother off must have been incalculably horrific.

Well, Alex had a true talent for doing such things.

"If I _ever_ see him in this house again, Alex…" The absolute inferno of unadulterated fury that blazed behind the woman's eyes, a mirror image of her daughter's, making her unable to finish her sentence through the haze of red clouding her throat. Seeing the absolute shift in character as a result of her comment startled Alex and rattled her to the core enough that she forgot to be angry at the way that her mother had advanced on her. With a stiff nod and several shocked blinks, Diane backed away from her daughter with an unreadable expression and an emptiness that lurked behind her eyes that could only have come from the burden of trying to get her soul back once it was already sold to the devil.

The look scared Alex shitless.

The older woman disappeared into her tiny bedroom, next to her daughter's, but separated by their petite bathroom.

Alex heard the lock click.

The next breath that she was finally able to inhale felt like flames licking up the walls of her lungs.

* * *

She lay in bed that night shrouded in utter darkness.

Clad in nothing save for her underwear, Alex lie on her side with her knees tucked to her chest as she stared into nothingness.

It was four in the morning.

The entire night and early day was spent pondering many things, reconsidering her decisions, and regretting just as many. The top of her regrets she refused to even think about, no matter how often the image of Fahri's panicked expression and the disturbing shade of purple he turned as he flailed around on the hardwood floor of his office acted as if it were seared into the back of her eyelids. She instead found her thoughts drifting to her Physics teacher: Frustratingly gorgeous, kind hearted, painfully unattainable, Piper Chapman. The kiss that they had shared that day, looking out over the bridge in the most cliché setting possible, had still tingled on her lips since they parted. The thrill of kissing Piper, someone so inevitable to her, made her heart throb in her chest as if it were aching to grow larger than the space allotted to hold it.

And oh, how inevitable Piper truly was.

The charge between the two of them was electrifying; this current of emotions that shouldn't be possible to feel for someone in such a short span of time should have scared Alex.

It didn't.

She welcomed the forbidden nature of their not-quite-a-relationship with open arms.

Which was why, obviously, she felt horrendous for snapping at her earlier the previous morning when the blonde had merely tried to talk her out of sulking in her classroom and talk her into seeking help from someone about what she had been going through, whether the help be from Piper herself or anyone else. She had just wanted to see Alex's heartbreakingly precious smile, and got yelled at in return.

Alex wanted to slap herself.

For the first time, she could utterly admit that she was at a loss for how to fix their situation. No matter how much the thrill of being with her teacher under the noses of the entire school and her mother was vibrant to her restless spirit, she knew deep down in her gut that this would not end well should they continue. They at the very least needed to slow down. The building passion between the two of them grew more and more intense as the days went on. The further away she was from Piper, the more she longed to feel the blonde's presence at her side. She wanted to see her thousand-watt smile and hear her bubbly laugh escape from between her soft lips.

Alex would not call this love.

She was completely, irreversibly, and overwhelmingly in lust with Piper Chapman.

And she didn't know what the fuck she was going to do about that fact.

* * *

Piper was in a similar state at four in the morning, no lighting in her room aside from the burning candles lined up on her dresser and the faint illumination of streetlights outside of her window. She wore flannel pajama pants and nothing else to bed, having been far too tired that night to finish getting dressed once she exited her nightly shower. Her blonde hair splayed out across her pillow, which was covered in a forest green case that not only matched her sheets, but very frustratingly reminded her of Alex's eyes. Thankfully she couldn't see it due to the lack of lighting in her bedroom, because imagining Alex's eyes was the very last thing that she needed to be doing as she tried to convince herself that she did not have feelings for her seventeen year old student.

Of course she was guilty.

The feeling had been gnawing at her stomach since their kiss several days prior, but there was nothing that she would be able to do to change it. The past was in the past; however she did have utter control over her future. Alex was everything that Piper could have ever imagined that she wanted outside of the life her parents had forced upon her. She was unpredictable and troubled, coming up from a hard life with tough skin and a sharp tongue. Piper wanted nothing more than to be able to feel those toned arms wrapped around her at night, but she also understood that there would be no way in hell that she could truly throw away everything that she had worked for just to entertain some fling.

That's what she told herself it was, anyway.

A fling.

Never mind the feelings of absolute joy whenever she and Alex made eye contact in the hallways or the thoughts of holding hands and cuddling on her couch on a Saturday morning that plagued her mind whenever she gave herself a moment to think. She couldn't have these things, not realistically, and Piper was deciding for herself right then and there to cut herself off from this _fling _in order to protect the both of them. It was for the best, right?

So why did the thought make her feel like someone had drained every smile that had ever graced her lips from her body?

The next morning, Piper got a visitor. Her doorbell rang, its chime a three toned bell, and at seven in the morning she should have been suspicious. Thankfully she was already dressed, having taken her morning jog and showered already, so she felt a familiar surge of confidence pushing through her veins that came with a lack of stress. All thoughts of Alex had been carefully avoided that morning, but this particular visitor would be sure to bring every facet of the younger girl from the depths of the blonde's thoughts. Piper strutted over to the machine against her wall and held down the speaker button.

"Hello?"

The audio crackled for a bit before whoever had rung her doorbell answered back with a timid sound to the voice.

"Hi, it's Larry…? Your mom sent me over."

With the drawing of her eyebrows together, Piper wracked her brain for reasons that her mother would send anyone over to her home at seven in the morning on a Tuesday. Struggling and failing to come up with a reason, she merely buzzed the man in and waited until she heard approaching footsteps escalating from the stairs. Before he could even knock on her door, she unlocked it and opened it a crack.

"What do you want?" She questioned, and while her greeting may have been rude, she equally did not appreciate strangers being sent to her home so early in the morning by her infuriating mother. The man was roughly her height, wearing a sweater-vest and slacks with loafers adorning his feet. His hair was short and dark, and his face was composed of average features that did not particularly jump out at the blonde.

Piper was not initially impressed.

Especially not next to vivid images of Alex's tall, sleek figure perpetually clad in leather and emanating confidence at every second of the day. His dark eyes seemed dull in comparison to the emerald green that haunted her thoughts daily, and the air about him had nothing on Alex's constant aura of exhilaration that lurked behind her eyes every time that they gazed into hers.

So no, Piper was not interested, at least not until told her why he was there.

"Sorry to bother you, your mom actually gave me your address…? I'm the guy she had set up a coffee date with a couple of weeks ago. She really just wanted us to meet, but she said you haven't been answering her calls." His dark eyes stared directly into hers when he talked, and she could appreciate that they did not linger at her chest or anywhere other than her face when he spoke to her. Larry's bushy eyebrows raised and his lips pursed as Piper took a moment to respond.

"And she took my lack of response to her matchmaking infatuation as an invitation to send the guy that she wants me to get to know to my house at seven in the morning on a Tuesday, a day that I have to go to work?" Piper's tone was intimidating, and it did no favors that she stared him down in a way that tended to make anyone on the receiving end feel as though she were double their height. The man cleared his throat awkwardly as his stubby fingers brushed imaginary lent from his shirt.

"I said I was sorry to bother you. Look, why don't we just go out one day this week for lunch or drinks, on me, and that way you can appease your mom and get free food and alcohol?" He finished his offer with a half smile.

That moment right then was the exact second that she had found her solution to her problem with Alex. As much as she might hate taking advantage of someone else, she told herself that this was for the better. She told herself that in order to protect Alex's future, as well as her own, she had to at least make it seem like she moved on to someone that she could actually be seen in public with, someone who could kiss her before she walked into the school building and not cause an uproar. She had to make it seem like she had moved on to a man who she wouldn't get sent to jail for being with.

And she was doing it for Alex.

As much as she knew that it wasn't true, she also told herself that Alex would thank her later. So, with a shrug, Piper bit her lip around a false smile and nodded at the man at her door. The feeling of churning in her stomach at the look that would etch itself on Alex's face once she told her nearly brought her to her knees, yet she held it together long enough to say goodbye to Larry and close the front door. She leaned her back against it with a hitch in her throat as she slid down onto the hardwood floor.

This was not at all what she'd had in mind when she applied for a job at Litchfield College Prep. She did not ask to grow terrifyingly real feelings for one of her students, she did not ask for said student to feel equally as passionate about their relationship, and she most certainly did not ask for her heart to break in her chest at the thought of hurting Alex. She had wanted nothing more than to claim Alex as her own and to be allowed to kiss her and hold the younger girl in public without it being wrong, but it just couldn't happen.

Not yet, anyway.

But Alex would go off to college when she was eighteen, and if there was one thing that anyone who had interacted with the girl for one day could notice, was that Alex was not one to remain stationary.

Alex was destined for great things.

And those great things did not include staying in New York her entire life.

Staying in New York was Piper's plan, originally. Recently she was not sure whether it was her plan or her parents' for her to stay in one place her entire life, find a nice man to settle down with, and have a family that her mother could put on Christmas cards. Piper initially was not one for traveling all over the world in search of adventures to relish and stories to tell well into her old age. She had wanted a simplistic, realistic lifestyle.

But Alex had opened her eyes to so much more.

Alex was a restless spirit if she had ever seen one, fated for travelling to different countries for the hell of it and living her life as if it were the last one that she would ever be granted. It was no secret to Piper that she was unpredictable and reckless beneath the surface. She could see the mischievous glint that lingered in her emerald eyes no matter what other emotion played at her exterior. Those were the things that made Piper take such interest in Alex. The younger girl exuded arbitrary escapades where Piper was raised to be nothing more than the metaphorical soccer mom, staying at home with the children and waiting for a guy like Larry to come home from work and ask if dinner on the table. The thought of _settling_, of staying stationary, shook Piper to the base of herself.

She didn't want mundane.

She wanted Alex.

But one thing that Piper Chapman did not have was the courage to love her.

* * *

**A/N: **Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the wait and also the short length of this chapter. There's been a lot going on and grades go in next week so I've been focusing more on school than this fic, but hopefully that changes soon. Secondly, I want to thank all of you so fucking much for getting me past 100 reviews on last chapter. I truly do appreciate every last one of them. I love getting feedback from you guys. Make sure you review this chapter also and let me know what you think or suggestions on what you want to see. (I know you guys hate Larry, I do. Don't worry.) Love you guys, thanks again.


	8. Chapter 8

**VIII**

* * *

Piper's lunch break was sixth period.

Often times Alex had convinced herself not to go and spend the fifty minutes in her Physics teacher's classroom in order to avoid suspicion, or perhaps even to evade her own growing sense of attachment that she felt to the older woman. She could spend days with Piper and not grow tired of the blonde's presence, as opposed to the few other people that she had dated or slept with who had only made her skin crawl after she grew sick of them. It was a devastating cycle, with the perpetual feeling of never being able to find someone that she could permanently have at her side, and the lingering thoughts that perhaps she was not built for love.

Alex had never experienced butterflies until she kissed Piper.

Not quite butterflies, but more like space shuttles crashing down around her stomach. It was the most horrifyingly mushy feeling that she had ever experienced, however it refused to leave the back of her mind. The feeling of Piper's lips on hers was still fresh in her memory and she could not think of any greater sensory detail to have on repeat throughout the day. So this was the afternoon that she would walk into Piper's classroom, step into her office, connected by a door against the back wall of the room, and place the lunch that she had bought for her down onto the shorter woman's desk. As much as the blonde had mentioned her love for parmesan shrimp Alfredo, there was no way in hell that Alex would forget that it was her favorite dish. She felt the steaming hot to-go box burn with comfortable warmth against her chilly fingers.

For the first time, Alex Vause was genuinely nervous.

She should have been.

Just as she reached for the door to the shorter blonde's classroom, the handle turned as if of its own accord and swung back to reveal none other than a frazzled appearing Piper Chapman.

She had her coat on.

"You don't have to go out. I brought you lunch." The brunette offered a bashful half smile and rocked back onto her heels as she watched several emotions play across Ms. Chapman's face.

"I-… I'm sorry Al-" The smaller woman seemed to stop herself and give an insubstantial shake of her head as if mentally berating herself.

"Miss Vause. I have somewhere to be for my lunch break, but if you have questions about the lesson you can come see me before eighth period or after class." Piper attempted to sidestep her crestfallen student, confusion etched onto the other girl's features as she tried to figure out how to respond.

_Miss Vause?_

"Oh… Where are you headed?" Alex questioned with furrowed eyebrows, fingers clenching anxiously into the to-go box between her hands. The brunette pushed her slipping glasses up the bridge of her nose with one of them. Blue eyes were drawn to the action, one that had endeared her to Alex so often, but Piper hastily averted her gaze and began to breeze down the hallway toward the teacher parking lot. She called over her shoulder with a voice forced into dismissiveness. "I have a lunch date."

Alex's heart clenched for a brief second before dropping into her stomach. She merely watched with crumpled pride as the doors at the end of the hallway swung open, letting in the bright sunshine of the afternoon spill across the floor and outline her physics teacher in a divine glow before locking shut. The to-go box in her hands may as well have been on fire for all the pain it caused her to look at it. With a deep rage simmering down in the pit of her stomach, she slammed the take out box into the nearest garbage can and stormed out through the opposite hallway in the direction of the student parking lot. Her boot clad feet were booming in the silence of the hallway, and the resonance of the door being thrust wide open had quite possibly disturbed a few classes in the midst of being taught their lessons.

Obviously, Alex didn't give a shit.

The thought had barely crossed her mind that Piper may be having her lunch date at the same place that the two of them had gone for their faux tutoring session nearly a week ago. The café down the street from the school was well known for its bustling patrons during lunch hours.

She couldn't bring herself to go check.

Seeing Piper sitting with someone other than her, in the same place that she had promised Alex that they would 'figure it out', would tear her apart even further.

Instead she halted outside of the school doors with furrowed brows as she considered her options. The raven haired teenager stood outside in the chilly air, bouncing on the balls of her feet as she made up her mind. She spun right back around and reached for the handle of the door, hoping for the sake of her sanity that it hadn't been activated to lock upon closing like the door to the staff parking lot. Unfortunately it was, and she was forced to trek through the crisp air of New York to the side of the building that Kubra's office was based. When she made it to the window of his workplace, she tapped her knuckle lightly against the glass as an irritated expression marred her face. Moments later, the window slid upward to reveal an amused Dean of Students.

"Alex. Fancy meeting you here." The older man smirked smugly down at his apprentice. Emerald eyes rolled and she stepped back a bit to get a better look at him.

"Fuck off. I need the key to your house." Alex requested with an expectant outstretch of her hand to the man leaning his head out of the window.

She was met with a chortle.

"Why would I do that?" The foreign man questioned, knowing the answer yet still giving Alex a hard time. They'd had this very same conversation dozens of times and knew exactly what the younger girl needed the keys to his house for.

The emerald eyed girl quirked an eyebrow and flexed her outstretched hand in annoyance. "Because you don't want me to use up your product just because you were being fucking difficult."

Kubra nodded twice in compliance, a smirk still tugging at his lips.

"Fair point."

Alex often used his home as a place of solitude to escape whatever she had going on in her life, or if she needed to get away from the far too familiar scenery of her own home. Their deal was that he never asked questions, only gave her the keys and stayed in another one of his houses that night. With copious amounts of cash came expansive houses in abundance, but also a vast selection of liquor that couldn't be missed if the owner didn't mind her drinking it. Kubra handed over the keys to not only his house, but to drinking away all of the shit that she had been through in the past few days.

She probably wouldn't be at school for the rest of the week.

* * *

Piper's knee bobbed up and down beneath the table of where the two adults sat in each other's company. The blonde forced herself to focus on the outstandingly lackluster story of how Larry's most recent article nearly hadn't made it into the paper. Some story about masturbation, except the person didn't allow themselves release? The blue eyed woman had tuned out as soon as he had called the action 'edging'. Who would give an affectionate term to something so unrewarding?

Who allowed him to write an article centered around fake masturbation anyway?

Her thoughts had unfortunately turned to Alex and the absolutely destroyed look that passed over her features when she told the younger girl that she had a lunch date. Piper had wanted to kick herself when she saw that the raven haired girl had went out of her way to buy her lunch, only to be off-handedly rejected by the person she had brought it for.

Piper's self pity was quite palpable.

It was rather an amazing act of self-absorbedness that Larry hadn't noticed that not only was she no longer listening, but also wishing that she could be in the arms of her seventeen year old female student, who probably hated her, instead of sitting across the table from him over sushi as he discussed other _raw_ things. Baby blue eyes trailed through the window, watching cars weave between each other on the streets and pedestrians walking briskly over the sidewalk.

She didn't deserve Alex.

"Piper? Piper…? Are you even listening to me?" Larry interrupted her self pity with a look of hurt on his face. Piper smiled apologetically and leaned her forearms on the table while giving him her undivided attention.

"I'm sorry. There's a lot going on right now." She apologized with the slight shrug of her shoulder as she leaned back into the booth's seat. Dark brown eyes across from the blonde studied her intently for a moment and the man raised a bushy eyebrow.

"You know, if you aren't feeling this then we can go our separate ways now, you know? We don't have to fake through this." He smiled endearingly and Piper returned the lift of her lips.

"You're faking this?" She questioned with a slight smirk as she mentally told herself that she was doing this all for Alex, to make sure that she didn't screw up her life. She had to make herself like Larry if this was going to work.

"No, but I get the feeling that you are. I don't want you to be uncomfortable." The writer admitted earnestly with an honest glint in his dark eyes.

Piper could do this.

She could make herself like him.

"I'm having a great time; there are just a lot of papers to grade and tests to prep my classes for. So what other pieces have you written?"

And that was how their lunch break went, Larry talking animatedly about his budding career in the world of journalism and Piper making herself find things about him that she liked. She forced herself to stop comparing him to Alex and to stop wishing that it was the younger girl's presence she was in instead of his. She had one chance to not fuck this up, so she enjoyed herself.

She really did.

She appreciated the free meal and the compliments that he showered on her to keep her smiling because he genuinely liked how radiant her grin was.

He should've witnessed it at its brightest when Alex was the cause.

A smile brought on by Alex illuminated the entire room.

They sat in the seafood restaurant for half an hour longer before Piper realized what time it was and told her date that she had to be getting back to the school in time for her next class. They parted with nothing more than a hug and a sincere affirmation from each other that they both had a great time, exchanging numbers to plan for future meet-ups. In the car ride back to the school building, images of Alex's deflated expression seared behind her eyelids every time that she blinked.

She never wanted to hurt the girl, it was the last thing that she wanted to do, however Alex didn't need someone like her in her life. A relationship between the two of them would truly hold nothing but destruction for both of them, and as much as she merely wanted to wait until Alex was eighteen, the growing bond between them within a few weeks would be nothing compared to the insatiable feelings that could sprout between them by winter and spring. Then Alex would likely leave the country when school ended in the summer and go off to do amazing things while Piper remained stagnant in New York because she was too cowardly to leave everything behind like she knew that Alex would in a heartbeat.

_That_ was inevitable.

_They_ were not.

* * *

Alex was catastrophically drunk by three in the afternoon.

The plush white carpets caressed the soles of her feet like clouds waiting to give way to an infinite drop. Nothing around her felt stable and the way that she danced across the floors to the sound of her father's album, a perpetual soundtrack to her life since she was old enough to even know what an album was, blasted through Kubra's speakers. The lyrics to one of her favorite tracks resonated through her bones, pulsing in time with the rapid beat of her heart.

Alex Vause was invincible in those four minutes.

In the first minute she listened to the opening chords that had strung out feelings that she had gained since she was a child, which were still unable to be articulated to that very day. The vibrations of the air around her sent her skin into a sea of goosebumps as she swayed in the middle of Kubra's living room, completely solitary in her engagements, and belted out the beginning words of the song. Had anyone been watching, cameras would have been out and pictures would have been taken to bring back up constantly until she was older; however, Alex was alone.

Absolutely, devastatingly alone.

All of which led to her breakdown within the span of three more minutes into her father's only album; the final connection that she could stand to have with the man who had blatantly complimented her 'rack' when they first met because he did not know what it meant to be a father. He did not grasp the weight behind the words, 'You're my daughter.'

Alex Vause's father was not someone that existed outside of her imagination.

The thought that anything good in her life would somehow crumble beneath the weight of her massive fuck up's had always lingered behind her thoughts like a cloud of doom. It merely had waited until she was drunk and alone to begin a thunderstorm in her mind.

The way that Alex had tried so valiantly to convince herself that she was not falling in love with Piper had been futile.

She didn't understand how.

She barely knew the woman, if she was being honest with herself, and perhaps that was why. Perhaps it was that Piper made her react with such a broad scale of emotions in such a short amount of time with such little background knowledge of each other. Their attraction was fire hot and scalding and scorching anyone touched by it. They were no slow simmering build up of love and lust, but they were a blazing inferno leaving injuries on anyone who got too close. They were destruction if given the chance. Perhaps that was why Piper had left her behind like everyone else. She knew that Alex was no stable lifestyle and normal partner. The raven haired girl thought it to be painfully obvious how anxious Piper seemed to be to leave all of her mundane life behind and to explore and travel like she did.

She was clearly wrong.

Piper wanted secure and steady, something that a seventeen year old fuck up who gets drunk in drug dealers' houses instead of attending class did not have to offer.

When did she curl up on the floor?

The Whisky bottle was halfway across the room for whatever reason and instead of wasting her energy and braving her turbulent equilibrium for the bottle; she merely turned over and faced the other wall as if she answers to her dilemma would be written there in marker if she stared hard enough.

She had never been one in search of _The One_.

Alex did not believe in love.

She had stopped right around the time that her mother had deemed her old enough to warn about the after affects of someone rolling over in bed one night and whispering across the darkness that they don't love you anymore. The fear that one night in bed with her future wife, two children tucked in bed and sleeping down the hall, a beautiful house and secure job, one of them could turn to face the other and reveal a devastating shift in emotion that would turn their entire grounded life into outer space had scarred her more absolutely than the gash on her face.

Alex was terrified of losing gravity in future her home like her mother had in hers.

She was terrified of the thought that she and whoever she ended up with would say 'I love you' so many times that the phrase would sound foreign on both of their tongues and they would forget what exactly those words meant. Perhaps Alex wasn't built to encompass forever, or to stretch out across eternity with anyone but herself because relying on someone to stretch that far with her and not snap in the process was asking for a trust that she did not have to give.

Piper was only proof that even the people most willing to love are afraid to do so fully.

She shouldn't blame her.

Alex inevitably would have done the same to avoid the catastrophe that was occurring at that very moment, the catastrophe of her curled up on an ivory rug that did not belong to her in a house that was not her own as she listened to the album of the man who had given her life, but no guidance.

One of them coming to their senses about how problematic their relationship would be was inevitable.

The two of them making it work and staying together, however, Alex was not so sure.

* * *

Piper didn't particularly want her mother to show up at her house at five in the afternoon, yet she was there anyway in all of her upper class, privileged glory.

She couldn't believe that they were related.

"I hear through the grape vine that you and Larry hit it off well. He's such a nice man." The older woman praised with a smile tugging at the features of her wrinkling face and her aged hands coming to fold in her lap as she sat on one of Piper's two couches. The Physics teacher had yet to take a seat, feeling the need to literally be on her toes around her unpredictable mother. The woman had asked for a cup of tea when she first arrived, even though she would refuse to go near it for as long as Piper could remember. Of course, then she had gotten a slight attitude with Piper for not properly preparing for guests, which obviously made little since due to the fact that none of the younger woman's friends drank tea and it would be absolutely pointless to purchase.

It was things like that, that made Piper wish her mother would stop coming by unexpectedly and judging how she maintained her own house. It was as if her mother was trying _too_ hard to make sure that she remained the favorite child between her and Cal.

"He's very sweet." Piper concurred with a minute shrug of her shoulder and the tapping of her fingers against the side of her leg. She leaned against the wall beside the entrance to the kitchen and watched her mother with the wary gaze of one keeping track of a wild animal. Anything could come from that woman's mouth and rock her entire world, so naturally she was cautious.

"I'm glad that you think so. I've arranged a ski trip for the two of you during your winter break that I was sure you would be thrilled about." The older woman grinned as she clasped her weathered hands together beneath her chin. Blue eyes widened and Piper choked on air as she struggled to comprehend just what the fuck her mother thought she was doing. Oblivious to, or perhaps ignoring, her coughing fit; Piper's mother raised a finger as she reached into her designer purse to pull out the brochure.

"It's non refundable so if something happens between the two of you, I'm afraid you'll just have to find another nice young man to go with." She nodded resolutely before placing the foldable down onto the coffee table and spread it out wide so that her daughter could see. Piper studied her mother once she was able to get a proper breath, before calling her out on the rush to get her and Larry together.

"Is this about me telling you that I'm not ready to get married?" The blonde accused.

That conversation between the two of them nearly a year ago had been more of an argument than her mother had ever tolerated before. Typically, Piper's mother liked to avoid situations in an attempt to make them disappear and would hardly even entertain a dispute of all things. However, as soon as Piper had told her that she was not looking for marriage just yet, and that she was still trying to get her foothold in life, her mother had snapped.

"_Yes_, you are Piper. I don't know why you are so adamant about not having a husband to provide for you… get you out of this tiny apartment into somewhere with a bit more class…" She explained as she glanced around Piper's decorated apartment in obvious distaste. The blonde's jaw dropped at the blatant insult to her home and Piper took a step toward her mother. The all too familiar inferno licking beneath her skin only spurred her words onward.

"_No,_ I'm not! If I want to build my career and be able to support myself before I want to settle down and get married, that's my prerogative. I don't need someone to support me, because what happens if they're like dad in deciding that a wife isn't enough, but unlike him in that they won't stick around just so that they don't give the neighbors something to gossip about?"

Her own eyes widened as she realized what exactly she had just brought up to her own mother, and what a painful subject it was for the other woman. The older blonde liked to pretend that her husband's infidelity did not affect her, but both of them knew the truth.

"I'll leave the brochure here on the table…If you have to check any of the arrangements then call the number on the front." She spoke as if Piper hadn't just delivered the lowest blow she could have possibly conjured. The older woman calmly gathered her purse together and stood to shuffle over to the front door. Piper bit her lip against the apology attempting to burst from her mouth. Yes, she had been brutal, but her mother needed to apologize just as much as she did.

It didn't happen.

Before the clock on the far wall could tick out a full minute, Piper was in silence once more and just as alone as she had been even when her mother was there.

* * *

**A/N: **Thank you all for the lovely reviews, especially the very in-depth ones. I love hearing analysis' of my fic. I'm not too sure how I feel about this chapter, honestly, but that's possibly just my reaction to the angst. I can't thank you all enough for the support this fic has gotten. I love you guys, I really do. Don't forget to review and let me know what you thought of this chapter, anything I need to make clear in the next one, suggestions, comments, reactions, etc.


	9. Chapter 9

**IX**

* * *

"…_There was a storm in her eyes that had been brewing for quite some time. Its winds shifted constantly and hurled hail, rain, and fire at whomever was in the way. Frankly she scared the shit out of me, made me nervous. She was as wild as those winds and as reckless as a forest fire. That was the point though. She said that if she scared the shit out of everyone, they couldn't see how scared she was. And she was terrified. All the time. So she fueled her flames and became a force of nature. A destructive beauty that wrecked all in her path before it could wreck her. She never really considered that she couldn't destroy herself though, could burn herself out until there was nothing left but an empty husk that lay used and useless until someone or something gave it purpose again. However, no one who cared was able to do so. Anyone who did was too afraid of her, too destroyed from her whirlwind of force. So her match never lit again, and it was very possible that everyone was relieved." The sound of Alex's voice dripped down Piper's spine like honey, caressing every inch of her mind with the soothing sound of her low register. _

_The words weren't clicking in her brain, at least not while Alex was speaking. The blonde was far too distracted by the toned, pale arms wrapped around her middle as she lie atop Alex on a warm leather couch. A fireplace crackled a few feet away, however it wasn't in her line of vision and therefore she paid no attention. The gentle molding of the younger girl's body to hers had made her eyes grow heavy as she lay against Alex. The taller teenager had just read a page out of her journal and, for half a second, Piper thought that it was about her. _

_Then she realized._

"_Al?" She murmured sleepily into the comfort of being alone with the one person whose mere presence could feel like a warm blanket on a stormy winter night._

_She was so sleepy._

"_Who did you write that about?" The blonde questioned. Her voice was barely a whisper, as if her words were afraid of disturbing the peaceful air that had settled around them. The girl stirred beneath her and she could almost hear the self-deprecating smile in her low tone._

"_Me."_

The feeling of her heart squeezing itself into liquid and attempting to flow from between the gaps in her ribcage at how devastatingly poignant that one word was woke Piper from her dream. Her forest green sheets stuck to her skin with sweat and the quick thumps fluttering in her chest were difficult to disregard. With bleary blue eyes scanning her immediate surroundings, her gaze landed upon the stark red block numbers beaming from her alarm.

3:46am

Those same azure eyes squeezed shut in frustration at the imbedded knowledge that she would not be able to return to her slumber for the rest of the night, or early morning. The sheets stuck uncomfortably to her skin and peeled away as she flipped them off of her body. The cold air in her apartment hit her like an unpleasant gust of snow and immediately, her teeth slammed together against the impending chattering.

Goosebumps rose on Piper's exposed skin and she quickly regretted only laying down for bed in a bra and panties. Her toes were the first to touch the icy hardwood flooring and the rest of her feet followed soon after. The next half an hour found the blonde in a steaming hot shower after she turned the heat on, and the two hours after that found her returning from a jog around her neighborhood. One more shower and a breakfast consisting of toast, strawberries, and bacon later, Piper was leaving the warmed apartment to head to her job.

Maybe she would see Alex again.

The thought made her stomach turn in a nauseating manner. The notion that Alex may see her and not even look her in the eye, or confront her about blowing her off, or not showing up at all made her sick. She already knew the feeling of her not coming to class.

She felt it the day before.

The unwell twisting of her gut consumed her as her thoughts spun a million times per second in her head at the thought of all the things that the other girl could possibly doing, and how many of those things were destructive.

She wanted to tell Alex that she didn't mean any of it.

Yet that stubborn, difficult to live with voice in the back of her mind kept saying that it was all for the best if they stopped any communication that was not school related as not to prolong the inevitable. That was Piper's only excuse, really.

They shouldn't work.

They _couldn't_ work.

But they could, and Piper was absolutely terrified to admit that she was the only thing holding them back at that point. She could easily wait until Alex graduated, and she could defy her parents' wishes one last time and run away with the girl. They could even live in a one bedroom apartment and Alex would probably make it feel like they resided in a grand palace full of new wonders every day. It was almost troubling, truly, how much life this girl held in a single spark in her eyes than she dared to even project in fear of being told it was all impractical.

She had heard that line her entire life.

_Have a back-up plan._

_That's not reasonable, Piper._

_Okay, but what are you _really_ going to do with your life?_

_Please, be practical, Piper._

And unfortunately for her, if someone hears something just enough times, they will begin to believe it.

Alex was impractical.

Piper was not.

* * *

Alex woke from her peculiar position on Kubra's couch with a sharp ache in her lower back and the inability to turn her head without her neck practically screaming at her with soreness. The inside of her mouth felt like a small animal had died inside of it and the pounding migraine beating at her temples wasn't exactly the wake-up call she was hoping for. Every light in the room surrounding the one she had passed out in was on in all of their illuminating glory. The teenager's emerald eyes shut immediately after she had opened them and a groan ripped through her chest and tore out from between her dry lips at just how absolutely _shitty_ she felt. It was one of the rare times that she wished her mother was there when she was younger to keep her away from alcohol and drugs and god knows what else.

But she hadn't been.

And it was too late to do anything about that fact.

Reluctantly, the raven haired girl sat up from the plush leather couch, the flashy red material peeled away from her overheated skin as she did and created an audible sound as she separated from the seat. With the movement, her stomach lurched and long legs awkwardly attempted to raise the rest of her body away from the couch and in the direction of the nearest bathroom.

She didn't exactly make it.

Pale fingers shook as they clamped over her mouth and her lips pressed together as she refused to let any of her stomach's upheaval onto Kubra's white carpet.

The closest she got was to the sink.

The porcelain structure felt like ice to her clammy fingers as she emptied her alcohol-filled stomach into the bathroom sink. Alex heaved air for nearly fifteen minutes before she finally gave up the attempt to quell the unnerving turning of her stomach. The pale teen slid down to the tiled floor and rested her head against the edge of the bathtub. She was covered in a sheen of sweat and instantly regretted her alcohol intake the night before.

She was stupid to drink that much.

Alex had no grasp of how much time she spent with her eyes squeezed shut and the onslaught of protest from her own body as the clammy skin of her forehead stuck to the marble bathtub. An undetermined amount of time later, Alex gingerly reached for her back pocket in hope that her phone was there. Luckily enough, she hadn't misplaced it in some ridiculous part of the house like she had done several times before. The device was on a measly two percent, which was astounding considering that she never used it; however it was the time that she was in search of. The white numbering stared back at her tauntingly.

2:34pm

_Fuck._

Of course she missed school. Not to say that she had any particular desire to attend anyway, but it would have been nice to have the option. It was that exact time, though that made her pause. It took her fuzzy mind several moments, but she realized what that odd feeling in the back of her mind was.

Ms. Chapman's class had started four minutes ago.

With the single thought of Piper Chapman came flooding images of the blonde woman's face as she turned down her offer of lunch in the most nonchalant way possible so that she could go on some date with god knows who else. The nauseous feeling in her stomach returned ten-fold and suddenly she was on her knees and bent over the toilet, spilling nothing but stomach acid once again. Several heaves and dry-sobs over how fucking _painful_ throwing up for her was later, Alex was back in her previous position and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Fuck her." The younger girl's voice croaked out a whisper to the silence and sounded pathetic even to her. What did Piper owe her?

Not a damn thing.

So who was she to get angry that a woman who had worked for her spot in life didn't want to lose it to some seventeen year old who didn't know how to properly handle her problems and drank several bottles of liquor alone in a drug dealer's apartment when shit got tough? Alex's lips curled in disgust at the state of herself and, slowly, she got to her feet. She needed to get in the shower and sort her fucking life out. She would go to school tomorrow, and she would get herself together.

This destructive behavior had to end.

She would do it for Piper until she learned how to do better for herself.

* * *

Her seat was empty.

_Again_.

It was almost as if that empty desk sat there, in the front of the class, solely for the purpose of mocking her. The rest of her pupils were in complete attendance and sat bent over their class assignment writing into the silence.

The clock ticked constantly above the classroom door.

Piper herself sat perched on the office chair behind her desk and stared blankly at a random spot on a stack of graded homework papers. The previous day had been very much the same, with her coming to class and teaching her lesson and giving her students busywork to preoccupy them until she could get the clouded haze of guilt and doubt sorted in her own thoughts.

The teacher part of Piper Chapman was not at her best right then.

The absence of one single student should not have been enough to completely derail her teaching methods. Without Alex's inquisitive questions and teasing smirk aimed at her during that eighth period class, she was loathe to admit that her passion for teaching was beginning to dwindle. She found herself absentmindedly shaking her head at her inner turmoil before the clearing of someone's throat interrupted her thinking.

Azure eyes shifted upward and quickly scanned her class of twenty seven present students for the person attempting to gain her attention. Not shortly after, a petite redhead in the back of the class waved her raised hand shyly. Piper quirked a dark eyebrow in acknowledgement and the teen stood from her seat as silently as she dared, then made her way over to the blonde's desk. She couldn't have been taller than five feet, with a spattering of freckles across her round cheeks and a continuously worried glint in her blue eyes.

She couldn't remember this girl's name for the life of her.

"Ms. Chapman?" The teen whispered as not to disturb the otherwise silent classroom.

"What's wrong?" Piper questioned and turned her undivided attention onto her student. She absolutely refused to allow Alex to have enough power over her that she couldn't even focus on teaching her students.

"I'm totally lost on the kinetic energy and work thing…" The poor girl looked terrified to ask for help. Piper gingerly took the worksheet from her student and skimmed over the information. As she opened her mouth to explain the first problem, her classroom door creaked open to reveal a deceptively bright-eyed Alex Vause. Several students also turned their heads at the interruption, but the dark haired teen paid no attention to them.

She didn't even look at Piper.

The blonde looked around the small girl standing in front of her desk, still anxiously awaiting an explanation for how to find work through kinetic energy and spotted the second best student in her class, a boy named Jacob Anderson who consistently turned in his assignments and never got less than a ninety percent on his tests.

"Mr. Anderson, come and help…" Piper trailed off as she glanced back at the redhead for a moment.

What the hell was her _name_?

"Michelle." The petite girl murmured nervously.

Oh, right.

"Come and help Michelle with the assignment, please." And without awaiting a response, already half out of her desk chair by the time the boy even realized what he was being asked to do, Piper took her long and powerful strides over to the classroom door. Before Alex could even sit down in her seat at the front of the class, her teacher's voice was already carrying across the room and straight to her ears.

"Miss Vause, outside." The azure eyed woman demanded as she pulled the wooden door open and stepped out of the classroom without waiting for the raven haired teen to follow her.

She trusted her class not to get rowdy.

Piper would probably never understand why they were so afraid of her reaction should they ever get in trouble, however it was a nice feeling to not have to stress out over the potential state of her classroom while she was away. Moments later, none other than Alex Vause emerged from the classroom door and stood in front of Miss Chapman with her backpack slung over one shoulder and her arms crossed tightly over her chest. Those hypnotic emerald eyes were hard and digging directly into her in such a way that Piper was rendered speechless for all of five seconds.

"What do you want?"

Piper's eyes could not leave her face.

This was the girl who had literally ran into her that weekend, on her way to buy her mother a birthday present, and joked about being a klutz. This was the girl who had stared at her so intensely before calling her beautiful and kissing her as if there wasn't a single person on the earth that she would have rather had her lips connected to.

This was Alex.

This was _her Alex_.

Looking at her, suspiciously alluring glasses, marred face, pissed off expression and all, Piper remembered exactly why she would never be able to let her go. Piper Chapman could scrub away at every fingerprint Alex had left in her being until she convinced herself that this girl had never been present beneath her skin, but as soon as she looked into those sincere forest green eyes, everything that she had believed to be wiped away was right back where it was and stronger than ever. This was the reason why, instead of scolding her for ditching her class as well as every other one, she said:

"I'm sorry."

Emerald eyes gazed down into apologetic azure ones for a long while. Whatever happened the day before, it was clear that Piper regretted it. She wasn't particularly in the state of mind to demand answers considering that she still had an underlying headache and a slight churning in her stomach even after she had taken painkillers, but she could tell that this was Piper resetting. This was Piper admitting that the other day was a mistake and that she wanted to forget about it. Alex was searching the irises that she had grown so fond of on such a short amount of time for any hint of deception or insincerity.

She found none.

Piper continued to look into her eyes for the elongated moment that they stood in silence outside of the classroom door, too afraid to twitch a muscle in front of the hallway cameras. She could freely admit, now, to being afraid of her feelings, but Alex was _there_ standing right in front of her with a hesitant look in her gaze and clenched fists on either side of her body as if she were restraining herself from reaching out to touch her teacher.

For a lack of anything better to say, the teenager released the corner of her lip from between her teeth and flicked her eyes between both of Piper's.

"No more lunch dates?"

The blonde let out a laugh at the absolute purity of the question, even though she could still feel the weight of the words sinking into the air around her. Cerulean eyes peered up into guarded emerald ones and a smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

Piper nodded.

"No more lunch dates." She confirmed with a reassuring lift of her lips that Alex immediately returned. They stood that way, staring at each other in what could only be described as genuine wonder at what would come next for the two of them. It would have seemed odd to anyone watching, the way that the two got so unreservedly lost in each other. They couldn't even fully grasp the reason behind the inferno that ignited between their gazes every time they connected, but then again they were far too lost in each other to even try. Eventually, Piper grasped just how long they had been standing outside of the classroom, which then led to the realization that she had left her class unattended for much longer than the few minutes that she had planned on being absent.

"We should head back inside."

However, halfway through Piper's sentence, the final bell rang and teenagers came pouring out of their classes with eagerness in which only a student could relate. They both took a mutual step away from each other in order to avoid being seen as having anything greater than a professional teacher-student relationship.

Alex nearly scoffed aloud at the thought.

Piper stepped around Alex and entered her classroom before her students could leave, reminding them to place their completed worksheets on her desk before they went home.

Once the class was empty and most of the halls were cleared, Alex stepped inside to find her teacher leaning over the front of her desk to disconnect her laptop and projector's cords. With a silent flick of the lock behind her, Alex glided up behind the blonde and wrapped her pale arms around the toned stomach of her Physics teacher. Piper stiffened in shock, but melted instantly into the embrace at Alex's familiar smell of ocean water and the reminder of late nights in college spent roaming the city in search of something ethereal to sate her underlying wanderlust.

"Stop it, Alex. Someone could walk in." The blonde protested even though she had not twitched a single muscle to escape the younger girl's embrace. Alex chuckled lowly into her ear and placed a lingering kiss on the cerulean eyed woman's neck, right behind her ear. Piper sighed contentedly and turned around in Alex's arms to peer up into her forest-like eyes. Her student quirked a neatly arched eyebrow in question.

Studying her face, Piper rose her fingers up to trace along Alex's scar as she so often found herself doing whenever they ended up this close together. To Alex's surprise, she didn't say anything about it. She didn't ask any questions, nor did she make any comments. Piper merely tilted her head up and pressed their lips together, sparking a slow burning fire between their mouths. Alex's plump lips moved languidly against hers as if they had every moment in the world to spend overlapping each other like an artist's intricate brush strokes.

Whatever this was between them was art.

It had to be.

Anything able to so beautifully evoke these emotions between them couldn't be called anything else.

Well, it could.

But neither of them were quite willing to speak the damning words of love quite yet.

* * *

"_The murderer of thirty-two year old Astrophysics teacher, Averie Nichole, has been identified as retired musician, fifty-two year old, Lee Burley. Burley was spotted in town several times last week according to several key witnesses. The motive behind the murder has not been released at this point in time. Stay tuned for more information on this case later tonight. Now we have Josh with sports. Josh…?"_

"_This week our very own New York Knicks won…"_

The sports reporter droned on about the previous night's basketball game, creating a backdrop to racing thoughts and forming plans. Tactics were his specialty, truly, and he took great pride in winning.

Kubra reclined in his plush chair with narrowed and calculating dark eyes as he gazed upon the small flat screen television in his office. The glass of whisky in his right hand, half empty, sloshed around a bit as he swirled the cup in measured circles.

He was rather protective of Alex.

The feelings of absolute rage that had built up beneath his skin and slithered into his every thought toward Alex's father were beginning to ebb at the success of his revenge.

He allowed a smirk to tug at his lips for a brief moment before schooling his face into one of indifference. His large hand raised the glass to his lips once more as he finished off the last of the liquor, and the empty cup made a quiet _thump_ as he sat it down on the small table beside the recliner. With his left hand, he scooped the remote from its position on his lap and turned the television off.

There was nothing else to see.

Silence.

Heaving himself up from the seat and slowly stepping over to his desk with an unreadable expression on his unbothered face, he pressed the button connected to his office phone that accessed the intercom down with a bit more force than necessary.

He was rather proud of himself.

Excited, honestly.

"Alex Vause, if you are in the building, please report to the Dean's office." He repeated the announcement one more time in case she hadn't heard him at first and released the button.

He waited.

Silence.

Anticipation.

A cleared throat.

"What do you want, Kubra?"

* * *

**A/N:** Here Kubra goes again. I can't thank you all enough for sticking with this fic and being so supportive of it. I really am grateful for every single one of you who take the time to read this. Don't forget to leave a review, please. They seriously make my day 100x better. Love you guys.


	10. Chapter 10

**X**

* * *

After a mass email was sent to every teacher and student at Litchfield College Prep concerning the loss of their well-liked Astrophysics teacher, glossing over the gory details and explaining why last next two days of the school week were cancelled, Alex spent the entire night tossing in her bed. Between the faux-compassionate paragraphs written by Kubra and the promise of endless support and grief counselors for the next two weeks, the urge to check herself into an asylum got alarmingly more prominent.

Alex had been at home already upon receiving the notification from her email, but speaking to Kubra in his office with the door shut and the room thick with the smell of expensive alcohol was what really drove Alex over the deep end. The way that he tried to explain to her that he had done her a favor, that this was something she should be _happy _about, was deplorable. She could do nothing but stand there as her head shook in subconscious disbelief while tears welled in her eyes at the _insane audacity _of what this man, the one who had shaped her into who she now is, had done. He had been so proud of getting her father life in prison.

He did it for her.

And she had to remind Kubra once again that she was not his child. She had to remind him that there are certain boundaries that are not to be crossed in the name of revenge. Sure, that was rich coming from her–she who had let that innocent teacher get kidnapped and murdered because she was too selfish to risk Piper's life in the name of someone else's. There was so much blood on her hands that Alex could barely look at herself in the mirror. She felt sick ever since she stepped outside of that office with Kubra's threat hanging heavy over her shoulders like a target if she didn't keep her mouth shut.

Two birds with one stone, he'd said.

He knew that she was aware of why the teacher was targeted to begin with but Alex would be damned if she ever let him believe he'd killed the wrong woman.

This was so, so fucked.

"Al? I'm home! Are you up?"

It was her mother stepping in the front door and Alex had been too entrenched in her own disturbed thoughts to have heard the keys jingling in the door. She couldn't bring herself to blink, let alone call back out in response.

"Al?" She called again, and the emerald eyed girl heard her mother's brief walk to her bedroom door. A sliver of light peaked through the crack in the space between the door and the frame where Diane stuck her head into the room. When Alex didn't move, the door began to shut again, but before it could she gathered the last remnants of her energy to call out.

"Ma?" Alex croaked. The soft sounds of her mom's sneakers on the hardwood floors as she made her way over to her bed were the only sense of comfort Alex had since the stepped into the house. The bed dipped beside Alex's side and she felt the gentle caress of her mom's fingers scratching her scalp.

"What'sa'matter, hun?" Diane questioned with furrowed brows that Alex couldn't see in the dark. The urge to tell it all right then, from the drug pushing, to the blood staining her hands, to her love affair with her physics teacher, was stifling. It was made even more unbearable by the fact that she couldn't tell her mother lest she make things even worse for everyone involved. So instead of admitting she was in far over her head and asking her mother to protect her from this life that she had found herself living, she instead shook her head and wrapped her arms around Diane's waist from her position lying down as she pressed her head into her side, eyes squeezed shut. It wasn't going to make her problems go away but she sure felt safer in those few moments than she had in years.

"Nothing. I love you, Ma." Alex murmured into her side with tears pricking behind her closed eyes.

"I love you too, Al. Get some rest. You have class in the morning." And Alex couldn't bring herself to tell her mother that she in fact did not have school on Thursday or Friday. The sharp reminder made her reluctantly pull her arms away from her mother as if she would taint her too by being too close. So all she said was, "Okay. Night." And waited until Diane had the door closed behind her to begin crying once more.

* * *

Thursday morning found Piper perched cross legged on her bed with her MacBook in her lap and a stack of grades to be entered resting by her knee. The night prior, she had uncomfortably skimmed through the email sent from the school on the loss of the Astrophysics teacher who had gone missing soon before her death before hastily deleting the message and going to bed before she could begin to get queasy. In the back of her mind she related the 'quitting' of Mr. Ayvez, a cover-up for his death, and the murder of one of her co-workers far too closely to be comfortable.

If the same person Alex was involved with was the cause of two members of administration being killed within two weeks of each other, then Piper's underlying fear was completely valid. To distract herself from thoughts like these, she entered grades. With Alex's increasing absences, she had many zeroes down for the girl on her grading chart, but when she put those zeroes into her teacher grade book and updated the webpage, those zeroes jumped to one-hundreds of their own volition. Obviously, Piper believed it to be a fluke the first time and tried to re-enter the grades.

They did the same thing.

Eyebrows furrowed and an alarmed flush making her neck warm, she glanced around the room as if she somehow expected cameramen to come out of her closet to explain that she had been pranked, but none of that was happening. This was real.

So she attempted the same with another student's grade to make sure that it wasn't just Alex.

Their grade was a zero when she entered the zero, not a hundred. For some reason that had Piper on edge, it was impossible to fail Alex in the system. The files she had looked at when doing research on her student had all been on paper. On paper, Alex's GPA was outstandingly low. In the system, it was an unweighted 4.0. Piper's lips parted in shock as she clicked on the girl's name to view her other grades and statistics in classes besides her own. The blonde was shocked to see that Alex had straight A's and not a single day absent from school.

Someone was tweaking the school system.

Piper didn't want to believe that it was Alex who was capable of doing such a thing, but quite clearly the things she was involved in were far above Piper's skill set, and getting involved was very obviously the last thing she should do. Did that mean she wouldn't? Well, of course not, but she would handle that when she got back to the school on Monday. These two days off she would focus on her goal of achieving the spot that she had secretly wanted since she graduated college.

The head of the Science Department.

Maybe it was selfish of her to be focused on such a task when the previous head of the department was quite literally terminated, and maybe she should be alarmed that perhaps the position itself was what had gotten Mr. Ayvez killed, but she wasn't. Was that foolish? Of course it was. Did Piper intend to drop it? No. She was never one to give up when things got hard when it came to work. Her relationships were a different story, but thankfully there was no 'Head of Relationship Material' position to be in the run for.

A dark voice in the back of her head even took into account that there were two less people to get in her way. Never mind that she was probably _over_ qualified for the position, but Piper liked to win by as much as possible. Close calls didn't suit her. With her class' test scores and grades being as high as they are without even lowering the difficulty level to achieve them, on top of Piper's high prestige herself, she was frankly unparalleled in the science department. Even with everything going on, that thought alone was enough to make her grin and continue typing grades into her laptop.

This was going to be a great year.

* * *

Thursday morning, Alex was at home alone. The vacancy did nothing to soothe her aching mind and bloody hands. She sat on the futon, tiny television off, staring at the black screen with a numb mind and furrowed brows. Rapid thoughts of Fahri on the ground, gasping for his life in pleas that he would've never stooped down to had he not been fighting death, the reporter announcing Ms. Nichole's murder and blaming her _father_, Kubra sitting in his desk chair refilling his cup of whiskey as he explained all he had done for her as if she should be _grateful_ to him, her mother being in so deep with this man that she slept with him regularly in exchange for their protection all shot around her mind leaving open wound after open wound.

She couldn't live like this.

The urge to flee was so deeply embedded in her bones by this point that she could pack all of her important possessions into her worn back pack and disappear within twenty minutes.

Her mind still returned to Piper.

Would she leave with her?

A bitter laugh escaped her dry lips as she shocked herself out of her reverie. There was no chance in hell that Piper would ditch her comfy life here to run away with some seventeen year old who had seen more death in her lifetime than birthdays. It would be insane for Piper to even consider it, and even with the short time that she had known the other woman, she knew her well enough to understand that getting her hopes up for the subject would only end in disappointment. Piper was nothing like her. She hadn't seen even whispers of the things that Alex had and the chances of her doing so the rest of her lifetime were exceptionally slim.

So Alex sat there.

And she thought.

She probably sat there staring blankly off into space for another half an hour before she shot up from her seat without warning and darted toward her room. Without giving herself a chance to talk herself out of her decision, Alex threw only her most basic necessities into her emptied book bag with a cold haste that would've worried anyone watching. The realization that the bag was still light even with all of her most important belongings in it refused to settle in her head.

Alex would contemplate the deeper meaning of that fact later. In the mean time she left an apologetic, but firm note to her mother scrawled out in her messy penmanship. Absent of any room to convince herself she was making the wrong choice, Alex slipped from her front door and made her way down the apartment steps with a swiftness that felt natural somehow. It felt normal to take her safety, and sanity, into her own hands. Once outside, the wind whipping her hair around her face as she hesitated, she glanced in the direction of the subway station and pursed her lips. Within a few seconds she had Kubra's number pulled up on her phone as she shot him a quick text.

**Can u send the addresses of my teachers? I need to drop off some late work. **

**2:11pm**

Surprisingly without any questions, Kubra sent seven addresses to her with the names of each teacher attached. Pulling a sharpie out of the small pocket of her bag, Alex scrawled Piper's address down in readable print across her arm. After placing the marker back in her bag, she began taking her phone apart. The battery, SIM card and physical phone were dropped unceremoniously to the concrete sidewalk. Taking a deep breath, she used the heel of her heavy combat boot to smash it all to pieces.

Walking off in the opposite direction of the subway, toward the bus that would take her to Piper's home, Alex felt as if shackles were falling off her ankles with every step she took.

When she arrived at Piper's apartment, Alex suddenly felt the weight of what she was about to do lock into her shoulders like cement. As if getting ready to fight, she bounced on the balls of her feet several times and shook her head quickly before allowing her hand to dart outward and ring the buzzer labeled 'Chapman'.

After a short moment, the blondes voice crackled through the machine.

"Who is it?"

Alex cleared her throat in a futile attempt to ease the phantom vice that seemed to be clutching her larynx.

"It's–It's me. Alex." The handful of seconds between Piper registering the words and buzzing the younger girl in felt heavy in the air. The breath of both relief and fear that surged through the Alex when the knob turned beneath her hand was electrifying. She didn't have to guess which door belonged to the blonde, because Piper stood waiting with one foot on either side of the threshold to her home with nervous fingers that wrung together anxiously.

"Al, what are you doing h–"

The older woman was cut off by Alex's lips crashing against hers with a fervor borne from the goodbye Alex was trying to valiantly to express and the emotion that rocked through both of them like the disruption of dormant volcanoes. With a gasp of air and one wandering hand pulling the forest eyed girl inside to privacy, they broke apart. As Piper closed the door behind them both, she turned and faced her student with a hundred questions in her sky-like gaze.

"Before you say anything, just let me talk...okay?"

Piper slowly nodded her head as she eyed the taller girl skeptically. Alex subconsciously began pacing Piper's living room as she started to speak.

"I– I have to leave. I don't want to put you in danger– any _more _danger than I probably already have. And on the way here I thought about all the different ways I could ask you to come with me so that you might even consider it– but the thing is, Piper... I don't want you to come with me. I don't want you to have to change your entire life for someone you know nothing about. And that's another thing I realized on the way here– you don't know me at all, and it's not fair to either of us for me to pretend that we're some star crossed lovers or whatever _bullshit _that people try to believe in _so badly. _At the end of the day you are– _were _my teacher and I was your student. To think that we ever would've made it to being more than that was just...childish."

Alex's voice tapered off and her burning gaze lowered itself to the floors of Piper's apartment. The silence that was left in its wake was deafening and the last words to leave her mouth hung sharp in the air like daggers ready to fall to the floor at any second.

Alex stopped pacing.

Piper's eyes were unreadable as she kept her head turned to the side, facing away from Alex about halfway through her speech. They stood like this, in silence, for upwards of two minutes.

The clock against the wall continuously moved without them as they stayed frozen in place.

Alex's fingers interlaced and pulled apart for most of the time passed until eventually Piper looked at her with misty eyes, though an icy expression fit onto her face like an expertly crafted mask. And the response Piper gave next was what shattered whatever piece of herself Alex had shamelessly given the older woman.

It was silence.

Piper stepped to the side of her front door and held it open, giving Alex her cue to walk out of not only her apartment, but also her life.

Alex tried, in vain, to meet the blonde's arctic gaze. When that failed, she nodded to herself one firm time before stepping over the threshold of Piper's door. The slam that the door made behind her harmonized perfectly with the _clank _of the last of her shackles falling to the hardwood floor.

* * *

**A/N: **It's been a while, huh?


End file.
